Lay me off, PLEASE, they said..

..Or so I'm hearing through the grapevine at my place of employment.  My employer has a facility in NY State, and as a result of current market conditions, elected to temporarily lay off some employees as a cost reduction measure.

   What's startling is that they ended up having to have a "lottery" of sorts to see who GOT to get laid off.  You see, the employees are smart.  They soon realized that current unemployment benefits are lucrative enough that they made more money on unemployment that they made by working.  When employees realized that unemployment paid $2000 more over the coming six-month period than they would make by working, a competition soon emerged for the layoffs.  Eventually, a mechanism was established by which all parties could agree who was going to get the "privilege" of getting laid off.

Do I need to even comment on the insanity?

I'd say this is "your tax dollars at work," but I realize that there is only a 70% chance that a US reader of this blog posting would have paid a single cent in income tax.