WHYY By When Janice Roundtree, 58, first enrolled in the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, she called it “a miracle.” Roundtree lives with three children and two grandchildren in her Strawberry Mansion home. She had been scraping by running a small catering and takeout business when the pandemic hit. The federal unemployment system provided a lifeline for her family amid shutdown orders and the tanking economy. Last summer, in what came as a surprise, she received several thousand dollars in unemployment compensation at once. Confused, she went looking for answers. “I tried to call PUA, but it was impossible. I tried to call them 1,000 times a day,” she said. Her granddaughter had helped her download an autodialing app.