It's a pretty good bet that this guy, although still employed, was not among those reporting confidence that they'd keep their jobs.
As a longtime journalist, married to a longtime editor, living on the same island as Wall Street, it's fair to say we have so many friends who are out of work that having a job is coming to seem odd.
"I have retrained several times, relocated many times, and always survived, at least until now," another EconoWhiner correspondent recently wrote. "This time it really is different, and I think that everyone can sense that. It feels like there are no actual jobs at the end of the Monster.com, Twitter and Facebook rainbow - it's really all one big support group."
On the last business day of 2008, there were just 2.7 million job openings in the United States, bringing the job-openings rate to 1.9 percent - the lowest since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started monitoring this eight years ago.
So, who were these optimists in the AP-GfK poll? Here's what I suspect: If it's true that we can't dream about our own deaths, maybe we can't contemplate a world in which the skills that we've learned, the jobs that we've worked at, the employers who have hired us and the industries that we've taken for granted are disappearing all around us. Maybe that one-third of Americans are simply in denial. Maybe the real question is, why aren't more of us?
Jill Andresky Fraser is the creator of EconoWhiner.com and the author of "White-Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration of Work and Its Rewards in Corporate America." Longer versions of this article appeared in the Los Angeles Times and tomdispatch.com.
