Have you ever had someone offer you a job unexpectedly, just when you needed it the most? That has happened to me several times in my 64 years. I've always been grateful and relieved, of course...but this Hub is not about that.

This is about the times when no one is giving you the time of day. The times when food, shelter, even the health of your loved ones is at stake. Not to mention your own self image. I don't pretend to know what it is like for a woman, but as a man, nothing is harder on what I see in the mirror than having no money and no gainful employment on the horizon.

My all-time low point came during much of 1984 in Portland, Oregon. Not until October did I land a full time job at a living wage. Homelessness was never more than a blink away until then. My new wife (#4) had drained far too much of her savings to keep us going. I still remember returning to our apartment on Hawthorne after my first shift. It was an ugly job, processing PCB-contaminated electrical transformers before shipping them to a toxic waste dump.

Yet ugly did not matter. I was a breadwinner again, earning a decent income. When I parked the car at home and stepped out, my step was light. Once again, I was a man.

We have a choice when we're unwillingly unemployed: We can become depressed or we can become determined. To stay on the positive side of that see-saw, it is well to remember the old definition of FEAR, which is: False Evidence Appearing Real.

Huh?

Quite simply, there is no such thing as a job shortage if you have the right mindset. Finding and keeping that "right mindset" can resemble a war...probably IS a war. But it is a war that can be won, especially with the addition of one more old saying: Action conquers fear.

Okay. No more platitudes. Let's get to the nitty-gritty. Here are my personal rules for Getting A Job When The Chips Are Down:

1. Don't get too picky. I have educational degrees and/or certificates in psychology, auctioneering, and auto mechanics. Even with all that, I have at times taken jobs and worked hard at dishwashing, truck driving, digging post holes, swinging an axe, and many more. I prefer to work for myself as an entrepeneur, but have also worked hourly pay jobs ranging from a single shift to 3 1/2 years in length. "Any port in a storm" is a powerful rule.

2. Don't be afraid to switch if it makes sense. As recently as late 2006, I needed a job and accepted the first one offered: Driving 18-wheelers OTR (Over The Road), pay to be based on miles driven. It turned out to be a terrible company--a big one, but not a nice one. I knew about another trucking company by that time, one that paid by the hour, hauling water to drilling rigs in western Colorado.

I worked just two weeks for the OTR company before openly telling the owner of the water hauling outfit that I'd messed up...and would like to come to work for him if he'd have me. It was a tough job in many ways but paid better than anything else I've ever done (outside of owning my own business). Without that switch, we never could have bought the brand new home in which we now live.

3. Pound the street. Or the telephone. Whatever it takes. One striking example: In 1969, I was working hard to finish earning my psychology degree at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana. I did have a part time job (which paid a handsome $2 per hour) working for a scientist in the school's Agriculture department.

My boss became enraged when he found my (first) wife helping me count wheat plants in an experimental plot. Not that she was getting paid; we just wanted to finish more quickly and enjoy a bit of the weekend (this was on a Saturday). I've never been really big on playing doormat. After he left, still spitting steam, I thought it over, dropped my wife off at our married housing apartment, then drove to his office.

Where I politely told him to take his job and.....

He got huffy all over again, giving me his version of the "You'll never work in this town again" statement. If you've been there, you know that can be a great motivational speech. We had no money for gas, so I took my beat-up old 3-speed bicycle, pedaled immediately to the east end of Bozeman, and began asking every business owner on the street if they (a) had a job opening or (b) knew of anyone who might.

Within two hours, I had two job offers, and eventually worked them both. True, both of them were pumping gas. Along with that, one job included selling groceries over the counter at the Town Pump, while the other involved busting truck tires at the truck stop whenever an 18-wheeler pulled in with a flat. And...both of them paid more than my plant-counting job did.

4. No matter what the prospective job may be, never doubt you can do the job. I cannot emphasize this enough. No, I don't mean being arrogant or overconfident in any way. An example? Let's see...when my second wife and I got our first group home houseparenting job in South Dakota in 1974, we had to face that question.

How, the Board Members who interviewed us wanted to know, did we expect to be able to do a job we'd never done before? Carolyn was terrified and truly had no idea how to answer. It was up to me. First, I mentioned my psychology degree (duh) but lightly, since they knew that part. Then I brought up the fact that I had been involved in the Big Brother program, mentoring a teenaged boy who had no father in the home, when I lived in Oregon.

After that, it was worth commenting on my having fostered a similar young man in Bozeman, Montana, during my school years, and of course that I would be looking to the Board for guidance if I got truly stumped along the way. Never mind that the Oregon Big Brother work was only for a few weeks. Never mind that the Bozeman kid ended up in jail. For that matter, I left out the fact that I would indeed consult the Board...right after the next Ice Age. I left those things out for obvious reasons, and they did not ask. Long story short, we got the job.

One obvious thing I've left for last: Signing up with your local Job Service, or whatever they call the State sponsored agency in your area. I've left it for last for a good reason: I did get one job through the Montana Job Service in Glendive, Montana...but only one. Ever.

That was in 1984, in the summer. The previous autumn, I'd been laid off by Halliburton when a drastic slump in the oil industry resulted in massive cutbacks. We had about two weeks of cash reserves in savings, and that was it. During that time, I physically approached more than 60 businesses in that town of about 10,000 people...and landed a job on the workover rigs that got us through the winter.

One final note: if the shoeleather approach does not work locally, there is always Plan B: Go where the jobs are. If you have to move to a different state, so what? Just two years ago, I thought I was comfortably retired in the state of Montana. Stuff happens. When push comes to shove, one thing becomes incontrovertibly clear:

I would rather be financially stable in the state of Colorado than living in a state of poverty anywhere.

Thanks for reading,

Ghost32