The waves have only been made choppier by the fact that the country’s unemployment rate of 7.7 percent has been compounded by various recent and much-publicized examples of supposed early or temporary retirement — hello, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Steven Soderbergh, Leonardo DiCaprio and Pope Benedict. Is the preternaturally tanned gentleman who’s always at the gym at 3 p.m. a casualty of the work force, or has he simply embraced the elasticized waistband lifestyle? What did your friend who was recently let go from Pfizer mean when she said: “Call me! Anytime after 11 a.m. is usually safe.”?

For the last three years, Miki Yamashita juggled her work as an executive assistant at a top investment bank in Los Angeles with her career as an actress. Laid off in January as part of a companywide staff reduction, she decided she had enough savings to pursue acting and writing full time. However, Ms. Yamashita is now bombarded daily by recruiters wanting to place her at another bank. Moreover, she said, “My nonartist friends regularly ask me if I’m pounding the pavement looking for another ‘real’ job.”

Asked what advice she has gleaned from her experience, Ms. Yamashita said, “Don’t assume that, if at his last job your friend was a quality inspector at an anchovy canning facility, that he is combing Monster.com all day long looking for job openings wherever salty fish are jammed into containers. Maybe he wants to sell his burlap afghans on Etsy now.”

Since last summer, the lapses of decorum that are regularly dealt the jobless have been popping up on Gawker.com. The site has been running a series of letters from unemployed people called “Hello From the Underclass.” One correspondent wrote of how, during her online job searches, the targeted ads on her Web browser changed from helpful vocational prompts to diaper ads. Another individual, let go from a nonprofit organization, wrote, “I even had one person tell me that I was in a better position than they were in because I didn’t have to deal with the stress of the office.” It seems that when you live in a world in which friends stop calling you because they think you’re a downer, a world in which potential employers don’t even bother to let you know that the job you interviewed for has been filled, you encounter static in even the most unlikely instances. A former police officer pursuing a master’s degree wrote on Gawker.com: “And you know what doesn’t help? Being told it will get better.”

Another bit of politesse that can misfire is the question “How do you spend your time?” Usually asked by a stranger who’s hoping to sidestep the awkwardness that can ensue when “What do you do?” is asked instead, asking someone how he spends his time strikes some ears as tortured. “No. We’re grown-ups. We do things now,” said James Davis, a comedian and Barack Obama impersonator who appears regularly on “Chelsea Lately.” “If you can’t answer ‘What do you do?,’ then you don’t have a passion. You’re just floating from drive-through to drive-through.”