I went to an employment workshop a few weeks back, where we talked resume language and search strategies and the like. As a former freelancer who deals in words, I felt like a lot of it was old news.

But for many of my classmates, the class clearly was a revelation, and a blessing on a couple of different levels.

First, these were men and women who had not written a resume or pitched themselves for a job in a decade or more - the record in the class was 38 years at the same company before getting dumped. These were not writers or PR flaks, people accustomed to whipping together written presentations and putting their best foot forward in words. They were customer reps and engineers and mid-level managers from whom everything had been taken away, who saw no way back to anyplace they wanted to be.

When I got laid off I started hunting freelance work online immediately, and running down ads online and in the paper, and cold-calling agencies I liked and respected to see if they were willing to come up with an odd online job or two. Talking to my classmates, I was shocked to see how many of them felt no such ability or opportunity.

I also realized that a lot of them were depressed. Really, really depressed.

There was the guy who is drawing unemployment, and nearing the end of that, who still pays for two or three rounds of golf a week, just to keep seeing his friends in something resembling a normal setting.”At least it gets me out of the house,” he reasoned.

There was the engineer who, after we had done some in-class exercises, asked me in all seriousness if he could hire me to write his resume for him. “It must be great, to just have the right words come rolling out of you like that,” he said. “Yeah, just great.” I thought he might cry.

There were a couple of guys who had been coming to the employment center regularly, theoretically to use the computers to hunt for work, but really because they were guys who were unexpectedly out of a job late in life and the best thing they had going these days was a place with some donuts and somehat drinkable coffee, where they would be welcomed inside and people who would smile at them and say hello when they entered, maybe even ask how things were going. I was reminded of Hemingway’s classic story, “A Clean Well-Lighted Place.”

I feel like this is a phase for me, something from which I will recover. They seemed lost. Done.

I hope I’m right about me and wrong about them.