With unemployment at its highest rate since 1998, chances are you've either been laid off, know someone who has, or are about to be laid off and don't yet know it.  To help get America's workers through this difficult time, Toad a la Mode offers these useful guidelines:
 

• It's important to maintain a daily routine.  Job-hunting is now your job.  But you're the boss now, so nobody can tell you not to drink (or force you to wear pants).
• Take up ant farming.  It's fun and profitable.  Okay, maybe it's not profitable, but just look at those ants go!  And you can crush your tiny workers at will.
• Exercise daily to combat depression.  Besides, now you can easily find the time.
• The poverty and blight in British movies has always been colorful, yet difficult for the average dot-commer to relate to.  Now you can rent those movies and feel solidarity with the characters who are "on the dole."
• Create a careful budget to make your final severance check, unemployment compensation, and savings get you through a reasonable job-hunting period.  Bwaah-ha!  You are so screwed!
• Those beggars and homeless-newspaper vendors have always been so annoying.  Now's your chance:  Ask them for money, or for advice on how you can get into their business.  Or just scream at them.
• Consider whether your hobby could be turned into a career. Surely someone would want to hire you to watch TV and surf for internet porn.
• Of course you're playing the lottery.  But with all the media focus on the high-jackpot drawings, you've probably overlooked the smaller games and scratch-cards.
• Visit a church, synagogue, or mosque.  It's a great place to contemplate your future, find peace, and pray for heart attacks to smite the bastards who did this to you.
• You've been dutifully paying your taxes all these years.  Enjoy this opportunity to sit back and suck off the government teat!