SLM Daily

A story straight out of sci-fi made the rounds (KSDK-TV, the St. Louis Business Journal) this morning: Apparently the Missouri Department of Labor got so many calls last month when Congress approved an extension of unemployment benefits that some of its phone wires melted.

Those reports, based on remarks by department director Lawrence Rebman, left us with tons of questions. Given the Missouri Department of Labor's ongoing phone problems (see this earlier KSDK report re: the difficulty of reaching a human being there), have department staffers ever noticed this, er, melting problem before? The reports don't say: Are we talking internal or external phone lines here? And has this now made it even more difficult to reach the department by phone?

One is even left wondering whether the office had difficulty procuring funds to get the wires repaired. It's not difficult to imagine routine maintenance tasks and upgrades falling by the wayside under current budgetary conditions—but the fact that phone wires were physically overwhelmed by unemployment calls is still astounding, as much for what it may say about the state of Missouri's infrastructure as for its commentary on unemployment. Are we about to begin seeing a larger pattern of infrastructure insufficiency and/or decay across the state?