At The Unemployment Office

I noticed that my 'Claim Balance' on my unemployment check keeps ticking down, and, after doing some simple algebra, I figured out when the money was due to run out. Only mildly panicked - and months before the cash ran dry - I went down to the local EDD office (that's the California unemployement office) to ask what I had to do to make sure the checks kept coming.
   Let me first say the people at the EDD are extremely helpful. You can tell they take pride in getting people work, and I haven't met one of them who wasn't a genuinely nice person.
   That said, they are still a California State bureaucracy. So I went through the door and stood behind the black tape, a good five feet from the counter, and waited my turn. That's when I noticed the 'Threatening a State worker is a felony' notice just beneath the 'wait here' sign. This alarmed me for two reasons, first because the staff evidently get enough threats that they feel they have to remind people that doing so is wrong, and second because evidently the threats workers receive are serious enough that making them constitutes a felony. Maybe they need hazard pay like soldiers get.
   When the nice older gentleman called me to the desk he tapped the sign-in sheet - gotta fulfill the requirements of the bureaucracy - and asked me what I needed. I signed in and explained my concern about my money running out. 'Don't worry,' he told me, 'you're on your first renewal, right? We're working on four. It'll happen automatically, you have nothing to worry about.'
   Yikes. Four renewals. That's two years. While I have enjoyed my time 'between assignments' I'm getting anxious to get back to work. I don't know if I can last two years.
   The nice gentleman told me he was sure I'd find work before I hit my two-year limit, and I left the counter feeling that I would, indeed.
   I stepped a few feet away to stow some of the paperwork he'd given me, and he called the next person over. 'I don't know why you people can't get this right,' the surly lady began the conversation. And then I understood the 'felony' sign up front.