As of last week, it was still amazingly difficult to get through to the Kansas Unemployment Office on the phone.

Hopefully today that will all change. According to the website:

Effective Monday, Feb. 9, 2009, the Kansas Department of Labor’s Unemployment Contact Center will temporarily extend its hours of operation from 7:00 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Monday through Friday and from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. on Saturdays.

This is great news for people who have been laid off. The online system is nice for submitting your initial and weekly claims, but when there are problems with your claim (I detailed my own a few weeks ago), the communication from the unemployment office is horrible. The best way to get your issues resolved is to try and get someone on the phone.

This isn’t easy. First, you have to actually get through. It took me days of calling and calling just to actually get through. Then, once you get through, you get kicked off the calls randomly because they don’t want too many people waiting on hold. Of course, they wait over 10 minutes to do so (a number that has decreased over time). When you finally get into the queue, you have to wait almost an hour to talk to an actual person. In my case, I was told that there was a single form that I had not filled out…something that could have been communicated to me on the site along with a link to the form.

Now that the hours have been extended, I’m hopeful that people will not experience the same frustrations that I did. Although, with the horrible January unemployment numbers, the office may continue to be just as busy as it was before. Either way, I applaud the Kansas Department of Labor for responding to the needs of the people. Perhaps they were tired of a post entitled KS Unemployment FAIL being on the first page of Google results for ‘ks unemployment’.

The power of blogging.