As much as we write about workforce trends here at Workforce Management, it’s hard sometimes to get a good feel for how they are affecting real people who are trying to cope with finding and keeping real jobs.

That’s why this story in Florida’s Palm Beach Post is so instructive, and at the same time, so frightening. “These are not happy times in the marketplace,” the story notes, “as anybody who bothers to get out of bed in the morning to float a résumé on Monster can tell you.”

The story gives you some sense of what this all means in one county, in one state, in a previously booming part of the country:

“[Florida’s] unemployment rate hovers at a 13-year high of 6.5 percent,” the Post reports. “The country is coping with cataclysmic financial news, the state is down 99,100 jobs over the same period a year ago, and Palm Beach County’s three job banks are filled to bursting with job seekers.”

 Yolanda Mendez, a 57-year-old grandmother and National Guard veteran who broke her nose in a bomb explosion in Iraq and now helps people find work at the Workforce Alliance career center in West Palm Beach, tells the Post: “People say, ‘Give me anything.’ They don’t say, ‘Well, I’m looking for this type of job or that type or I need to make $20 an hour.’ They say, ‘Anything, anything, anything.’ ”

With the financial turmoil on Wall Street and in Washington threatening to turn an economic downturn into a full-blown recession (or worse yet, potentially a depression), the anxiety is spilling over to job seekers or people who may soon become job seekers. They’re getting increasingly desperate as they reach the point where, in a terrible job market, any job is better than no job.

“I’ve actually had to give a few of them a hug,” says Stephanie Ross, a receptionist at one of the Palm Beach job banks. As the Palm Beach Post story notes, “She tries to keep her cool as she directs jobless customers to the computers and counselors and, once in a while, to the tissue box. ‘Yes, they come crying,’ she says. ‘It’s always been busy, but it’s becoming progressively worse. Yesterday, we saw 195 people in this room alone, and that was a light day. I try to tell them they’re not alone,’ she says—which is decidedly accurate, with more than 600,000 Floridians unemployed.”

My guess is that you will soon be reading many more stories like this one from Palm Beach, and that the clear sense of fear and desperation that is evident in this one will become less noteworthy and more commonplace.

That’s why it is always good to remember that even if you have a good job you need to hope for the best but always prepare for the worst, because as is becoming all too clear in this turbulent economic environment, the worst generally happens when you least expect it.