Humble PieI recently lost my job, not that this isn’t a job, but it’s not the job that makes it possible for my family to eat and the DWP bill to get paid. Those water mains won’t fix themselves you know. So this is a big problem at my house because all of us have gotten into the habit of eating and most of us are into bathing, which means I’m going to have to find another job real soon. Suddenly everyone else’s recession has become my own personal depression.

“What happened?” I’ve been asked over and over. “I lost my job,” I find myself answering robotically.

But it’s not like I lost my keys. I know exactly where my job is; my employers have simply chosen someone else to do it.

“We’re taking the company in a new direction,” said the mean man who took the kibble out of my new kitten’s mouth. (Did I mention the wife and I just adopted a rescue kitten?) I was quick to point out to the boss my compass also has 360 degrees on it, so if he would just point me in the “new direction” the company was headed I’m sure I could go there, too.

That’s when he lowered the boom – he was going in the direction of a meeting I still had on my calendar and I was going in the direction of the unemployment line, which is a scary place to be anytime but semi-terrifying today.

Losing my gig is extra-frightening because while at times I may act like a kid, just ask the wife, I’m hardly a kid. But I’m not Larry King either, so I still have life left in me. Yet, I am old enough to remember the Beatles from “The Ed Sullivan Show” rather than a video game system and that makes me closer to retirement than an exciting new chapter in my professional life. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

I’ve written many times about the struggles of working people in Los Angeles. When I had that other job, I yakked countless hours about how difficult L.A. makes it for businesses to thrive or even survive. But getting the ax takes all the headlines and all the government reports and all the studies and morphs them into one gigantic knot in the pit of your stomach.

Losing a job is like a death in the family, a beloved relative if you loved what you did; but even if you hated your job, losing it is like losing a distant rich relative who sent you a check at the holidays.

Losing your job is a profound event. There is a grieving process and then, hopefully, healing and recovery. The irony of my situation is not lost on me. I may be the one of the few people in Los Angeles whose career was helped by our crummy city government. Antonio Villaraigosa was my own personal stimulus package.

Millions of Americans have lost their jobs in the past year. We’re now told it’s a good thing when the economy only sheds another 250,000 jobs. That’s a sign the recession is slowing. Really? Or is it a sign we’re running out of people to fire?

Candidates for office great and small preach the gospel of the workingman. Retraining is the stock response when pressed for an answer to lost jobs. But politicians fall silent when you ask, retrained for what? What exactly is a 47-year-old sheet metal worker with a wife and two kids supposed to be retrained for?

Nobody asked me, but I always resented the politicians and corporate titans who decided there were jobs America was better off without and justified their actions by saying there were jobs Americans would not do.

Americans are not lazy people, but sometime we are gullible people. Many of us, myself included, had been lulled into a false sense of security – as if the life we had been leading is the life we are entitled to forever. Obviously, life offers no such guarantee, unless you’re Ryan Seacrest.

Ideally, we find much more in work than just a paycheck: a sense of self, a purpose, hopefully a greater social good. And the paycheck part is good, too. But it’s the whole package that makes the loss of a job such a humbling experience. I accept my job loss in that spirit since I could probably use humility more than most.