I have a full time job. Or I did. I was working full time for the last year, and now my employer doesn't have enough work to keep all of the employees busy, so they laid off a bunch of people and cut back the rest of our hours. Simple enough right? Well, (in Illinois at least) there is a partial unemployment benefit where if you used to work full time, but now you're part time that you can get partial unemployment benefits for that week. So I go apply for this figuring now I'm part time and won't have as much money. Everything is fine and dandy, I'm going to get it... as long as I don't work over 19 hours in a week. So here, I fall into this grey area. If my hours are cut exactly in half (20 hours a week now vs. the 40 a week then) and I get half the pay that I'm able to survive and scrape by on, then I don't get any help from the state.

Yet, if I work 18 hours, I get $168 for that week from the state. How the hell am I supposed to live on HALF of what I was barely scraping by on before? I figure if I take my bill money each week and NOT buy groceries and NOT put gas in my car to get to work in the first place, I'll only be -40 a week!

So before I didn't qualify for food stamps (since I have no kids, and I'm single) because I "made too much." So I call and talk to a lady to see if I'd qualify now. She says that I would, except that I won't right now, but in a couple weeks. So for at least 2 weeks I have NO food. I needed to lose weight anyway.

That's the question. How can you not make enough to survive, yet overqualify for any kind of assistance? Has anyone else ever fallen into a grey area before? That's my life.. one great big huge blob of grey area.