Unemployment is a full-time job.

I wake up in the morning without an alarm even buzzing. I lumber down the stairs to make a pot of coffee with enough caffeine to rile up an Arab militia. After a few burning sips, it’s back up the staircase and into my office, or what you may call the spare bedroom. I sit down, open a window and wait for the computer to power on. Now it’s time for work. Only I’m not getting paid, and I’m not actually doing any work.

Does any of this sound like your own morning routine? For so many millions of Americans, being unemployed is a full-time job. If you’re out of work and looking for some, think about all the hours you spend scouring those internet job search engines, trying to find a needle in a haystack of call centers, secret shoppers, and work-at-home opportunities that sound too good to be true and may or may not be operated by those same Nigerian princes trying to give you their fortunes. Hey, maybe you ought to forget the job search altogether and just take the money.

If you’re a professional who’s out of work, traditional resources aren’t really any better. Staffing agencies are hit or miss. I have a Bachelor’s degree from a Big Ten university and more than four years of full-time career experience. The last time I was between jobs I went to a staffing agency and the only interview they scored for me was with a company that wanted me to sell knives. Each state has some sort of free job assistance program financed by public funds, but they often work to help the “chronically unemployed.” If everyone you help keeps losing their job, maybe it’s you who should be looking for a new one. And honestly, who sits down with a pen and a newspaper to peruse the classified ads? Find me five people you know who succeeded in scoring careers with that method in the last five years, and I’ll hire you to work for me.*

For those of us who are stuck floating somewhere in the middle of that sea of unemployed – not qualified enough for those attractive jobs we want, and too overqualified for those ugly jobs we’ll take – we have to find a new approach. For me, the keyword wasn’t a term I could type into Google. It was my words. You know, those sounds that don’t come out of your mouth as much as they should when you’re staring at a computer looking for work all day? I had to talk to new people to find new events and activities and opportunities, and had to go to those events and activities and opportunities and meet more new people.

Networking is something we’ve been doing long before the internet, long before newspapers and long before awful staffing agencies and job assistance programs. If you want the best secret to finding a new job, it’s to meet new people. Volunteer. Get involved. Network! You’ll be surprised by how many people you’ll meet who have similar interests, skills and backgrounds just like yourself. And they know all sorts of other people out there who may be looking for someone exactly like you to add to their office team. You may not get a job out of networking, but at the very least you’ll make some new friends who you can get a beer or a cup of coffee with – friends who will listen to you complain about how hard it is to find a damn job.

And that’s still better than waking up and wasting your day alone at home, wading through the train wreck of terrible jobs posted online.

*Not really, but with tenacity like that you shouldn’t have a hard time finding a good job somewhere else.