The office looks like any other: thickly carpeted hallways, neatly aligned cubicles, sliding glass doors for the higher ups, street-facing windows and real doors for the even higher up. Conveniently located in midtown near Grand Central, it boasts a cafeteria with a mute but constantly running flat screen TV and a fully stocked mailroom.

The hush is like other offices too: People silently clicking away on computer keyboards or talking in lowered voices so as not to disturb those nearby.

It must be the similarities that reinforce the instinctively corporate behavior because no one here has a job. Everyone is desperately looking for work. But I can’t figure out why there isn’t at least one person running through the hallways screaming, or another sobbing in a corner.

We are the dispossessed: the refugees from Lehman Brothers, and Bear Stearns, Citigroup, and AIG. We are the backwash from the first wave of the economic crisis. We are pale and our eyes are rimmed red. We don’t sleep much from worrying about the mortgage payments and the kids and how we’ll pay for next summer’s camp tuition.

Sol and his wife had just finished a $350,000 renovation of their Connecticut home. He was working happily in the New York office of a large Canadian bank when he found out his position was eliminated. Now his biggest fear is that his oldest son’s learning disabilities will require private school and he will not be able to pay for it.

Violet has an MBA and a law degree, both from top quality schools, and 15 years of financial experience. She was working for an insurance company when she was recently “RIFed” (the latest term for laid off, cribbed from “reduction in force”). She has two-year-old twins and a house in Astoria. Both she and Sol were the major breadwinners in their families, and thankfully both of their spouses still have work. But the spouses don’t make half the big salaries Violet and Sol once commanded.

Then there are the single mothers. You can spot them easily enough. They favor navy suits and neck scarves, faux pearl earrings and blow dried hair—their looks are a career investment, after all. Their eyes dart nervously from one place to another as if they are searching for a place to find school lunch money or enough to pay the sitter this week.

Amid the emotional wreckage wrought by the market meltdown marches Paula: small, stout, confident, a halo of golden hair on top, wide-eyes made wider by rings of dark eyeliner. She calls out “great necklace” or “I love the shoes” or “how ya doin?” as she sails past. In a sea of despair, Paula is a beacon of hope. She believes everyone will get a job. “It may take time,” she says, “but it will happen. No one here ends up in an Amana refrigerator box under the Brooklyn Bridge.”

After five months of unemployment, I am convinced that Paula is the reason people aren’t throwing themselves out the windows of the outplacement firm. Known officially as a “career management consultant,” Paula is almost impossible to get an appointment with. The firm has a half dozen such consultants but everyone wants to work with Paula. She is part mother confessor, part Freudian analyst, part cheerleader, part coach. When a half a dozen job interviews turn to dust in a single week, Paula orders a massage or a manicure or a walk in the park. “Nurture yourself,” she advises. “It’s important to take a day off from the job hunt. It keeps you fresh.”

The one-on-ones with Paula are essential, partially because you get to find out important and interesting facts about her, like: she met her husband while working at a summer camp in the Adirondack mountains 40 years ago and this same husband is a dead ringer for the actor Richard Dreyfuss, and that when she is not counseling the unemployed, Paula is a mystery writer and a New York City history buff and has published a novel called “Gramercy Park.” But her best work goes on in a group, in the impossibly named “Campaign Management Strategies” meeting that occurs every other Tuesday at 10.30 a.m. Paula lets you keep coming to this meeting even if your program at the outplacement firm has ended. She believes everybody will get a job sooner or later and that the group will never get too large and somehow she is impossibly, unbelievably right about this.

Wrapped in a pashmina scarf, ensconced in a seat at the center of a conference table in the front of the room, Paula lets everybody take a turn in the spotlight. Cecilia, a former PR woman now willing to work as an executive assistant, talks through her last job interview which ended with a hug but no offer. We all try to figure out if the fashion and beauty industry is just filled with conniving scheming phonies (I myself am partial to this view) or if Cecilia’s long tenure at a competitor made the interviewer balk.

Norma goes next. A former compliance officer at one of the largest banks in the country with a penchant for headbands and June Lockhart collars, Norma endeavors to keep her spirits up by attending career fairs, applying for temp work, chatting with others in the outplacement cafeteria, and offering to help anybody in any way she possibly can. We all want her to find a job soon, otherwise we fear she will become an outplacement fixture.

After Norma comes Earle whose hair and mustache are pure white, and we know—although no one even whispers this—that it will be nearly impossible for him to find a job. We try to convince him that it’s worth learning how to use computer job boards like Linked In, Career Builders, and Indeed.com. He promises to try.

Earle is followed by Meg of the questionable décolletage who lost her job as a financial analyst and is looking into nonprofit work but has a big deal litigator husband and so doesn’t really need to do anything and is floundering. We tell Meg to get some structure.

Then there is Leslie, the credit card specialist who has an intimidating job hunting spread sheet that details everyone she’s spoken to and every company she’s applied to, and who, two weeks ago, had six interviews lined up for jobs in exotic places like the Bahamas and London. Now, nothing has panned out and she is so discouraged she can hardly sign on to her email. We offer solace. We encourage her to cook (she is very thin and something of a gourmet). Paula takes her into a much coveted one-on-one after the meeting breaks up because even she thinks this is scary. Leslie emerges looking refreshed.

“This is all about accepting change, going through a grieving process, and coming to a new place,” Paula says. “It’s not easy but it’s doable.”

My own journey has included the steep ascents and devastating plummets typical of most job hunts. Sometimes—as in dating—that great job seems just within reach, just as the perfect gal or guy feels as if they are right around the next bend or on the next barstool.

But when the market crashed this past September and the entire planet went into lock down, it was hard to remain sanguine. Through it all, Paula and the group were there, telling me it would be all right. I even promised to buy Paula the same Star of David that I wear, since she admired it so much, if I got a job.

And then, lo and behold, the perfect offer did materialize, even though the market had dropped 700 points the day before. I was so elated and astonished I took my kids to see “Beverly Hills Chihuahua” and thought it was the best movie I’d ever seen.

Two weeks later, I was still walking around in shock and awe, when my eight-year-old nudged me. “Mom,” she said exasperated in a way that only an eight year old can be with a parent, “you have to buy Paula’s necklace.”

“Oh yeah,” I said, as she guided me into the synagogue gift shop where I dutifully placed the order.

“How could you have forgotten?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I just didn’t believe it was really real.”

“You mean the job?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“It’s real, Mom,” she said. “I answered the phone when they called and made the offer. I know it’s real.”

“You’re right,” I said. “It is real.”

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Jacqueline S. Gold recently accepted an offer to write for the CEO of a global accounting firm. She lives in New York City.