In this week's Stranger, I look into the question that many people have been asking in Slog comments and in e-mails: How can our state's unemployment hotline still be understaffed six months into this economic crisis?

It's been more than six months since the number of new unemployment-benefits applications began soaring in Washington State. In September of last year, when the current economic implosion began, there were about 41,000 new claims. In October, the monthly new-claims number was up to about 55,000. The November total: 66,000. The December total: more than 90,000.

We're now in February, with the layoff spree continuing in Washington and around the country, and yet the unemployment- benefits call center run by the state's Employment Security Department remains overwhelmed.

"It's like Russian roulette trying to talk to a human being over there," wrote Schuyler Bagwell, who was laid off from Seattle's Community Court in October, in an e-mail to The Stranger.

So what's going on? Part of it is about the way the Employment Security Department is funded, a complicated mess that I explain in the story, and part of it is that the state couldn't successfully forecast that this was coming and move fast enough to bring on new workers. Which to me raises some questions:

Once the economy started collapsing, and unemployment claims started spiking, it should still have been pretty easy to figure out that a call center staffed by just over 100 people (as Washington's was for much of last year) wasn't going to be robust enough.

Simple, back-of-the-napkin calculations make the point. The state knows that the average call to set up a new unemployment claim takes 15 minutes. If just three quarters of the 55,000 people who filed new claims in October had done it through the call center, it would have taken 100 call-center employees about two and half straight weeks, working only on new unemployment claims, to process it all. The call center, it’s worth noting, doesn’t work only on new unemployment claims—there are backlogged old claims, disaster relief claims, federal emergency unemployment compensation claims, and disputed current claims to be handled too.

Of course, not everyone does their unemployment benefits business over the phone; the state has a web site where people can accomplish many of the same things, though there are complaints about that as well. Still, the math is not yet on the state’s side.

And, again, we're now about six months beyond the September beginnings of this economic crisis. In the comments of the story, Mark Varadian, spokesman for the Employment Security Department, has a long and interesting note explaining the state's side of things a bit more. It's worth reading, and there's some good advice for the unemployed in there.

I particularly liked the ending:

Back in the days when everyone had to apply for benefits in person, it wasn’t unusual to wait in line for two hours or more—outside and in the rain. Our current system isn’t perfect, but it’s a big improvement on the past, and we will keep working to make it better. Meanwhile, we appreciate your patience.

Got something to say to Varadian? Get in there.