It’s getting to be a regular part of Sunday: Log into the UC system and apply for last week.

It makes a lot of sense to do this online. The phone system in this state is awful. The local paper looked at the records and found that something like 86 percent of callers got hung up on.

So a little while ago I used the last of the coffee in the house to brew up one last cup, topped it off with the last of the milk, and logged on to file my weekly claim.

But it didn’t work.

After logging in and clicking “I understand” on the page that threatens me with all kinds of hell if I lie to obtain benefits, I got a screen informing me that the system was down. Should be up and running again, the page said, by 12:45.

At 1:00 I logged in again and saw the same page, only now the “up and running time” is 1:30.

You know, at my last job, I would have gotten fired for stuff like that. Thankfully I was laid off instead, so I can collect unemploy…

Oh, never mind.