Talking with my guitarist over lunch last week, we both agreed it was good to be employed. Do we love our jobs? That would be much too strong a word. Both of us would be happier if our band was our job. But the $120 we made last night won't even pay a whole month at our practice space.

I've had big chunks of unemployment in my life after college. It took me months after graduating to get a job at a video store. This was our last big recession, the one that kicked the first Bush out of office. Eventually we came out of the thing with the big tech boom of the late 90s, but it feels different now. It's certainly much bigger.

Back then no one was talking about housing prices and sales. Or the amount of money leveraged against real estate. The last time of wholesale bank failures (remember when they were savings and loans?) was in the late 80s. We've got the highest unemployment in a long time. And even our unemployment agencies are understaffed.

It's kind of funny how certain people seem to be about this second bailout. No one saw this coming (even I thought we hit a bottom during the summer...and then came the big trench), but everyone seems to know exactly how to fix it.

No one knows anything, which is the real scary part. Everyone's talking, but there are opinions all over the spectrum, which means someone will be right and a whole lot of people will be wrong.

The first bailout last fall was directed at the banks. We threw money at them to loosen up the credit market. And the response by those institutions, pretty much unanimously, was to tighten it even further. Where did that money go? Why were interest rates on credit cards raised, limits lowered and other strange tricks employed to create less of a flow of money in the country?

So I'm thinking it didn't really work. Layman's opinion. $800B down some drain we can't even find.

It's all fake money to me. I don't really know how much $800 billion is. If this was stacked up in cash, we might not be able to find a room big enough to put it all in. My calculator doesn't go up that high. You can't win a lottery this big.

It's too big. It's too small. No one thinks it's just right, but something had to be passed.

It takes too long, it's short sighted. What does an extra $400 spread out over a year do for you?

I'm not out of a job. In fact, more lottery tickets are being sold, so I'm thinking my job is kinda secure for a little while.

And yet, I keep looking through the meager job openings in the paper. I know a couple of friends who would love any kind of work. Any amount of money coming in.

The headline this week was that the new bailout had no "magic bullet." Because, apparently, shooting this depression will fix something. For those thinking up analogies, bullets are destructive, not constructive.

We can't come storming out of this problem. It has to be gradual. If we go back to the thinking of a few years ago, we will have this same problem after our boom of euphoria. This recovery must be built, not ramped over like a speed bump.

So those of us with jobs will keep them and hope not to get hit by the tsunami. Those without will continue to scramble.

And what comes after is on all of us, because we were all wrong.

Matt Worley has failed at pretty much everything except staying alive.