Sunday, September 4, 2016

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (71)

Given the unemployment office's unintentional (or perhaps intentional) delay in mailing the benefit checks I was entitled to, I was, consequently, forced to go to the New York State Employment Bureau again to try to get placed on some kind of clerical-typist-type job before my hoped-for 6-month period of being on unemployment benefits, which would enable me to devote more time to folk songwriting and activism and romantic love-seeking than I had been able to do in the 1970's during my periods of wage enslavement.

Surprisingly (and perhaps because the New York State bureaucrats felt that if they didn't make more of an effort to place me quickly I might actually end up being able to collect the unemployment benefits from the State that was due me), after I scored 80 wpm on the typing test that I was given, the New York State Employment Bureau actually set-up an appointment for a job interview for an open "dictaphone-typist" position for the following day.

The catch, however, was that the "dictaphone-typist" job opening to which I was required to go to in order to retain my unemployment benefit eligibility, and required to accept if offered in order to retain my eligibility, was with a New York State government agency which I felt functioned as a tool for unjustly incarcerating, in a mass way, the African-American poor, U.S. political dissidents and left-wing anti-war and anti-imperialist activists, poor whites and white working-class people of all races in New York City:  The New York County Supreme Court at 100 Centre Street in Downtown Manhattan, near Foley Square.