Denis Lemire's Site

Employment insurance is the biggest joke we have going in this country! Geez… you take a doctor prescribed one month stress leave during the process of your life falling apart. You’d think that’d be a cut and dry case of “gimme my @#$%~! money.” The amount of hoops one has to jump through is ridiculous!

First you go to their website and fill out their claim form online, all the while thinking to yourself that they got a clue and automated the damn thing. Afterwards you receive their lame teledac details in the mail. They give you this really awesome code that allows you to sit there on your @$$ while a rather erotic feminine synthesized voice repeats a far too verbose question twice, along with your answer for every single friggin detail they need, half of which is stuff you’re repeating from the original claim anyway.

By the time you’re done with that, you wish you had no hearing to begin with. If that wasn’t bad enough, you have to repeat the damn automated system from hell every two weeks… I’ll admit, it was my fault for letting the other one sit on my desk for so long. I just couldn’t bring myself to call that automated whore of a computer again. Finally mustered up the emotional strength to push her buttons today, only to find that its angry at me for being late.

Now I have to talk to one of their actual people during regular business hours which of course coincide with the range of time in which I could not possibly get ahold of them, unless I call them from work. Aaargh! Considering how lousy EI is setup, if given the choice I’d keep my premiums and take whatever risk it is they are supposed to be protecting me from. Don’t even get me started about this six to eight weeks thing either. In six to eight weeks I either starve or find another source of income, usually the latter.

Ah, what a boring life I lead. It seems the most exciting thing I have to write about is the mail server upgrade on Incoherency.net. Sigh. Ditched Sendmail in favor of a Qmail/vopmail/MySQL solution. Seems to be working quite nicely…

Yes, I’m still here… Finally got around to fixing the issues with this site and getting everything back on-line. Its been a rough several months. The former finance is no longer a part of my life, for starters (I’m much better off!). Far worse my dad passed away on October 31. I have created a memorial site in his dedication. Aside from that, still kicking along doing whatever it is that I do.

Neato! managed to recover my web site for the most part. A lot of the code for has ceased to function at this point. I will look into why.. later.

Kaboom! The main 4 GB hard drive in this server decided it would be rather cute to explode and take everything down with it. After a wasted weekend all the services this box provides are now back on-line. However all data, including web sites and email access, for the moment is lost. When I have more time to play I’ll look into what I can recover. In the mean time I will begin my task to write “backups are good idea.” one hundred times.