Back during the height of the pandemic my wife applied for and received unemployment. She has a little bit of a weird job where her pay is not hourly or salary and shit got complicated. She also applied for some that she probably wasn't entitled to. I told her not to do that, even though money got a little tight around that time. I didn't really understand everything, I didn't want to know, but I just told her "pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered" and not to push it. Anyway, we're two years on now and she's still fucking with it. The state is trying to recover the money they say she shouldn't have gotten, but from what I understand they are overreaching and trying to take back money she was entitled to. I was sort of disgusted by the whole thing when it first started and I have largely stayed out of it. It's been her thing to deal with. In my opinion, she has fucked it all the way up, it's her fault and I'm not fixing it for her. It pisses me off even thinking about it.
At some point, maybe she got scared or I had a moment of weakness, I made an appearance during one of her hearings with the TWC. (I am a licensed attorney.) I have handled a few wage claim issues with TWC in the past and it is a very aggravating process.
This morning my wife had an appeal hearing. She had asked me to stay home with our kids and dog while she had this hearing. Sure, no problem. The hearing was at 8:30. I'm downstairs tending to the kids and the dog and scrolling the news on my phone. At 8:30:30 she comes running downstairs and I can hear the hearing officer on speaker asking about her personal representative. Something like, "Do you want your personal representative on this call?" She's looking at me with this deer in the headlights look. She doesn't know what to do. So I finish slinging breakfast at the kids and haul ass upstairs to my office. I say that I'm present and that kicks off a series of exchanges with the hearing officer where he's berating me for not being present when the hearing started, my wife already said she didn't want her representative present, do not leave the phone again, etc. Dude is ordering me around and berating me and shit. When I ran up, before I even said anything, he was asking my wife if she'd received certain documents. She was flipping through them in front of me and she said she'd received something that wasn't there. I was like, "Hold on, hold on. She doesn't have that document." Guy tried to shut me down again and told me to be quiet and stop interrupting the hearing. It sort of went downhill from there for a while until I finally figured out what was going on. She had missed the deadline to file an appeal and it was very clear. The whole hearing was just a dog and pony show. No substantive issues were reached at all. If the fucking guy had just told me that from the beginning I would have just walked out of the room, probably. So, my wife didn't ask me to be part of the hearing or tell me anything about it other than it was happening and then drags me into it while the hearing is in progress with zero preparation. Let alone the fact that she fucked this whole thing up and cost our family thousands of dollars because she tried to fuck around with unemployment.