It never rains, but it pours... -- Old Proverb

It's official: barring still another extension of unemployment benefits, I've signed for my last check until I find a new job... which means things will be getting extremely tight around here. What makes it worse this time around is that I have been (back on) blood pressure medication, so any lapse in medical coverage will result in "Pre-Existing Condition Hell" -- and unbeknownst to me, we've been behind enough on our other bills that by Sukkot I may own and/or have access to nothing other than the clothes on my back.

A few weeks ago, things were beginning to look up: I'd had what appeared to be a "tryout" offer from an Internet-based job, doing customer service. The compensation seemed a bit high for the position, but not unreasonable enough to ring alarms. The Web site seemed to check out, and while I still had some suspicions, Frank thought it looked legit. Our initial e-mail exchange sounded straightforward enough, including a pre-employment contract outlining the terms of the probation. Things started looking fishy when I was not asked for the usual I-9 identification documents, but was told I'd be trained to sub for the Finance Director...

You can probably figure out where things went from there... or where they could have gone, were I a bit more gullible. I'm still kicking myself for not having realized the "line" was dragged through four separate domains, none of which was a week older than the initial contact, before I recognized the... fiction... for what it was. If I had been "awake enough" to have researched the domains earlier, the concerns involved might have had less information from and about me.

Internet crime has been getting increasingly more sophisticated, and the sites aimed at helping us protect ourselves sometimes have trouble keeping up. Still, there are some really basic common-sense things I should have done a lot earlier -- like Googling the company name, paying attention to the e-mail addresses, and checking the domain registration information.

Fortunately, I figured it out before the scammers got too much information from me -- but it took me an entire morning to fill out the FBI cybercrime reports. Unfortunately, I think I put the pieces together too late for investigators to catch these folk.

Now, I'm back to the grind of trying to find a job, any job, that does not require me to have either a driver's license or a car, and that I can commute to and from by bicycle and/or by public transit. Trying to figure out where money for food, rent, utilities, and insurance -- much less medication and diabetes supplies -- is going to come from. Trying to keep at least the most basic set of things we need to live and to make (what purports for) a living. This has not done anything good for either blood glucose or blood pressure levels.

I know that every test we go through has a reason, but I'm also smart enough to see "the big picture" -- and that picture suggests things in the US are not going to get better.
But as I've said to others before, "'Not surviving' is not an option."

Somehow or other, we'll get through...