Unemployment Claim Issues Resolved

For posterity. A summary.

Job ended 01/20. Started a new claim the following Monday. There's a new system in place to confirm your identity and I used "ID.me" -- turns out that my NY Labor Dept email address and my ID.me email address are different and that ended up being the issue for why my payments weren't being released.

That said, I'd been claiming benefits each week. Waiting week is always unpaid. I got the confirmation for the amount of benefits but the payments weren't been posted/released.

The new NYS Unemployment hotline has changed, I think, so if there are too many callers, it just says to call back later. Found a good hack to automatically get through the all the automated menu options using "," for pauses. Through some trial and error, this is what worked for me:

1 (888) 209-8124,,1,,,,,,,,,9,,2,,,,,,,378801062,,1,9176,2,2,5,3

Of course, it works now, it won't work if/when they change the menus, but you can basically trial-and-error it until you've got something that works. Then you just keep autodialing until you can get through. One of these would take (even with the automatic inputs) about one minute, thirty seconds to get to the end. But having it auto-dial through the menus is really helpful.

FWIW, I finally managed to get through to someone on a Friday morning right at 8am when the hotline opened. In addition to confirming my email addresses for the NY Labor Dept and ID.me to release my payments, I received some holiday pay from my last job unexpectedly, which I reported on the phone. (My job ended 01/20, the holiday pay arrived on 02/02 -- so I just wouldn't get paid unemployment benefits that week.)

The person I spoke with was very helpful throughout.

Don't panic.