Well, actualy, I did get a couple of passes, and one of them worked out very nicely.

But before that happened, I was hitting it hard. I printed personal business cards with contact info and my desired job title, and I handed those to everybody. Everybody. My daughter's orthodontist got one. People renting costumes at my wife's shop got one. Everybody I know, and everybody my wife knows, is aware of what I can do - and not just in my normal profession, because let's face it, my wife's ex-boss's sister doesn't need a web developer. But she does need the crap hauled out and the walls repainted in the flat her mother just vacated for a nursing home.

If I weren't doing stuff like that, I'd never have had the huzpa to win the primo gig I'm doing now. Antidepressants help too. Look, I've just taken on a management position (I have no management experience) in a field where I have no experience, with "IS Manager" as a side-job to justify a salary way above the posted maximum for the position, because the President of the company desperately wanted to hire me even though I was completely honest about my lack of qualifications. And I'm going to make it, despite knowing jack about what I'm doing, because I feel good enough about myself to ask enough questions and delegate enough and generaly use the help my co-workers are offering so that a month from now I'll be the best damned Logistics Manager (whatever the hell that is) they ever saw.

You don't go in desperate and unemployed and make that kind of impression. You go in confident and self-employed and ready do it.

I got my share of rejection. Resume's and calls that didn't get answered, interviews that went nowhere.

I didn't start winning until I convinced myself that my worst-case scenario was working my ass off in the crappy little jobs that are always, no matter how bad the economy or how widely distributed the blacklist, available, to keep my family alive. I came to the conclusion that I would survive, by sheer determined service and doing what needed to be done. I would not lose the house. My family would not starve. Life might suck bigtime, the credit card people and doctors might get real cranky and the taxman might have some questions, but we would survive.

I got some more rejection after that. Attitude is NOT everything.

And then I walked into an interview with my head high, knowing that I didn't need the job so much as the guy on the other side of the desk needed what I could do for him. OK, I was damned lucky. But I was ready to grab the lucky break and make something out of it.

Yech. Stuart Smalley here - I'm going to make it - because I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me! Pathetic. But true.