Behind the latest unemployment figures showing another 500,000-plus Americans lost their jobs is a sad truth: The deeper the recession becomes, the more it touches people whose livelihoods have never been threatened by dark financial times.

Now the employment line includes workers who've never lost a job before and always believed experience and hard work would protect them.

Many of them are shocked and depressed — or stuck in denial. And they must confront the worst job market since the end of World War II.

Some say they will take any kind of work, no matter what it pays or where it is. Others hope they can somehow squeak by on unemployment insurance.

In interviews across the country, three newly jobless contemplated their futures in these uncertain times.

'STILL IN CRYING STAGE'

One December morning, after she had just printed a stack of orders for Avnet, a North Carolina distributor of computer components, Julie Banner got stopped by her boss.

Do you have a minute? she was asked.

Banner walked into an office and listened to a disembodied voice carried by speaker phone from regional headquarters. She was being let go, the personnel representative told her. Banner knew times were hard. Four others had been laid off in September. The 42-year-old saleswoman believed she might be spared.

"I was just hoping that I wasn't going to be one of the people affected," she said, bracing herself against a bitter wind outside a state unemployment office in Cary, a Raleigh suburb. Earlier this week, in her first foray into the world of joblessness, she arrived to find that a rush of unemployment applicants had crashed the state's computer system.

"It was a very interesting morning," she said. She came back a few days later for a training course on how to find jobs in the weak economy. It takes two paychecks to keep her daughter in preschool and pay the family's mortgage. And her husband works in the same industry that she did.

"I'm still in the crying stage," she said. "My sense of security is gone."

A DREAM EVAPORATED

Josh Tanner studied for years, and worked for years, chasing his dream. He thought he was well on his way to managing a golf course, where he would be outdoors in fine weather, the place he liked best.

Then suddenly, the dream evaporated. He was let go as a groundskeeping supervisor at a Las Vegas golf course catering to tourists.

When he first got the news in December, he did not call his wife. He called his brother-in-law for advice on how to tell a woman just two months from delivering their third child that they were losing their health insurance and their only income.

"I didn't know where to start, or how to go," Tanner said. "He told me to be honest. He said try to be upbeat and positive about trying to find a job. She doesn't need the stress."

So the 27-year-old told his wife, KayCee, that there was still hope.

But in these perilous times, how many can afford to play golf?

With no savings, KayCee persuaded him they needed to ask for help. Their church donated two weeks' worth of groceries and diapers. His family, his friends and his former boss are helping him look for work.

'LOOKING AND WAITING'

Martin Feves lost his job just after Thanksgiving. The Portland, Ore., metal purchaser had already shelled out $150 for tickets to AC/DC, the head-banging 1980s Australian band with a legion of middle-aged fans.

Feves proudly counts himself a true follower. So he drove three hours to the show outside Seattle with his 14-year-old son.

Even that didn't help.

"AC/DC was fantastic," he raved. "But I was just sitting there worrying."

For nearly 30 years, he maneuvered through multiple downturns in the high-tech and aerospace industries, including working for airline manufacturer Boeing.

His luck ran out Nov. 30, when he and 19 others were let go from Davis Tool, where he worked as a buyer of airplane materials. He lost a job paying $60,000 a year. His wife, who is on disability and suffers from bipolar disorder, said her monthly medication costs as much as $1,000.

They survived December on his unemployment check, her disability payments and their savings account.

"There's not much we can do now," he said. "I'm looking and waiting."