LOUISVILLE, Ky. — The first time Joe Enderle and his wife, Maria, stayed up until midnight to make an appointment for in-person unemployment insurance (UI) assistance, they failed.
“Louisville had 66 appointments but they were weeks away,” Maria said. She checked other cities and found that all the appointments were available on the same day. So Maria tried Louisville again.
“They were all gone,” she said. “Six minutes and everything was gone.”
She didn’t make the same mistake the next night. “I just typed really fast,” she said.
For weeks after the state opened more than a dozen Kentucky Career Centers (KCC) for in-person UI appointments, many people found that loading the Labor Cabinet’s website at midnight and typing fast was the best ways to land one of the coveted appointments.
But on Friday, that process changed for the more than 94,000 unemployed Kentuckians. Hours after Spectrum News 1 asked a spokesperson for the Labor Cabinet to respond to complaints about the appointments opening at midnight, the KCC website posted an update saying that the appointments would become available at 9 a.m. starting May 21.
“The application we use for scheduling appointments is managed by a vendor, and midnight was the time the program updates with the new appointments,” Kevin Kinnaird, information officer for the Kentucky Labor Cabinet, explained in an email.
“We have asked the vendor about moving the time since we implemented the schedule. We were made aware this afternoon that we can now update that time to 9 a.m. EDT Monday through Friday.”
That’s a more convenient time for Hayley Kuykendall, who has spent many nights trying to snag a midnight appointment for her spouse, who is owed unemployment dating back to October.
“It’s like the survival of the fittest," she said. "Whoever could type the fastest would get the appointment.”
Now that the Labor Cabinet is releasing the appointments in the morning, Kuykendall said the competition may become even more fierce. “It might be even a smaller window now,” she said.
For Kuykendall, the in-person appointments are her best hope for a resolution to her spouse’s UI case. Multiple phone appointments have failed to correct the problems which have contributed to their falling seven months behind on rent.
It’s why she made every effort to land an appointment, despite having to report to work herself at 6 a.m..“I would wait and refresh the page on my phone, his phone, and the laptop at 11:59,” she said. Sometimes she’d make it through to the booking page. Other times the servers would seem to overload. “It would just freeze,” she said.
Enderle is in a better position, despite the missing UI payments. He lost his job delivering coffee in April of 2020, but his wife and adult daughter, who lives at home, have remained employed during the pandemic.
Throughout 2020, the UI process worked the way it was supposed to for Enderle. But his troubles started in April after the system was put on ice for several days following widespread fraud issues.
When it came back on line, claimants were given eight-digits pins for an added layer of security. But when the Enderles tried to claim Joe’s benefits, they ran into trouble.
“It just kept looping me back out saying I needed to file a new claim,” he said.
Like many thousands of people hitting roadblocks with the state’s overloaded UI system, Enderle decided that getting in-person help was the best way forward.
After trying and failing to schedule an appointment during waking hours, he was advised to try what he called the "midnight madness." Kuykendall said she learned about the midnight appointment release in a Facebook group where unemployed Kentuckians share tips on how to get their problems resolved.
For Enderle, resolution may have come Thursday when he had his in-person appointment in Louisville. The person he met with identified the problem with his account, which had a hold on it, he said. “She removed the hold and got me all set up for the following week,” he said. “I shouldn’t have any more problems.”