Today’s New York Times Business column discusses how the federal government’s unemployment rate is misleading because it does not include unemployed people who “do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior four weeks, and are currently available for work,” which was the criteria for being unemployed that the Bureau of Labor Statistics established way back in the 1870s.

The “actively looking for work” distinction is important because the unemployment rate should not count people like stay-at-home moms, dot-com millionaires, 20-something trust-fund slackers, and retirees. But this also means that the 5 percent unemployment rate that politicians often cite does not include prime-age people who just can’t compete in today’s marketplace and have plumb given up. Think of the coal miners in West Virginia, or the furniture tradesmen of North Carolina. The article calls these people nonemployed. (By the way, nor does unemployment rate account for the 1% of the American population that is imprisoned, but that’s another issue).

Since becoming disemployed, I have fallen into a routine where I leave the house between 10am and 1pm. This is prime time for us jobless folk to do our errands while the rest of the populace is settled into their offices. I see mothers pushing baby carriages or leading their babbling toddlers on the sidewalk. I see retirees bantering with store clerks and steering their Buicks down the street at 15mph. I also see a few, but not many, people in the prime of their life. It could be their day off, or they could be a second or third shift worker, or they could be “between jobs” like me.

But I live in Boston, an economically vibrant area where anyone willing and able to work can find something. I know there are places in America where there are no jobs, and I shudder to think about that sense of hopelessness. One factory shuts down and the entire town suffers. People compete for jobs at a Wal-mart, or do odd jobs to pick up cash, but they cannot find a good, steady job if it does not exist. They are nonemployed, idled, waiting, or not waiting.

Today, while working on my other website, I spent 45 minutes dealing with Dreamweaver’s proclivity for formatting bulleted lists with all different sizes of round discs. I concluded that Dreamweaver arbitrarily sets the disc size in the WYSIWYG design view, and there’s little recourse but to delve into its messy HTML code and manually set the size of each freaking. Little. Bullet. Disc.

I decided to take a walk. The afternoon was mild though windy, and the sound of melting snow and chirping birds calmed me as I strolled down the quiet residential street. About 1/4 mile from my home, I came upon a stockpile of discarded furniture set upon the curb for tomorrow’s trash collection.

The trash-picking tendency that I inherited from my father nagged at me to stop and inspect the offerings. There was a large, sagging recliner with stained orange upholstery; a full-sized futon mattress; a wicker end table with dozens of cracked strands; and a straight-backed faux-wood chair with curved arms and a wide, brown pleather seat.

The chair caught my eye. The faux-wood was peeling a bit and it was cheap-looking, but it was structurally sound and I liked the spacious seat. We could use another random chair at our place, and it was manageable enough to carry home without causing a spectacle.

As I mentally prepared myself to actually pick a neighbor’s trash, a Ford truck drove up and parked across the street. A pudgy older man wearing clean overalls and a plaid cap with ear flaps emerged and beelined to the recliner without looking at me. I started to pick up my chair when he said, “Hey there, ma’am, can you help me lift this into my truck?”

He seemed pained to ask this of a woman, but perhaps the fact that I was a fellow trash-picker mitigated his distress. “Okay,” I said. He went over to his truck and opened the rear gate.

“You take the top,” he said, bending over to get a grip on the base. “Shouldn’t be too heavy. Just an awkward weight, you know?” We lifted together and leveled the chair in the air, then slowly walked over to the truck and put it down beneath the open gate.

He suggested that I stand on the open-air cargo bed to guide the recliner while he lifted. For some reason The Silence of the Lambs flashed in my brain, that part when the killer lures a victim into his van by asking her to help him move a piece of furniture. But obviously this would not happen in an open-air cargo bed, so I climbed up and tried to pull in the recliner while he heaved it into the air. With some difficulty, we were successful.

“Hey, thanks,” he said. He smiled, although it was a stiff smile of an old man who does not smile often. “Thanks.”

“No problem!” I said. He waved to me when he started up his truck, and I waved back. I was smiling broadly and suddenly eager to abscond down the street carrying my straight-backed faux-wooden chair.

Pity Mr. P, who had to drag his disemployed wife out of bed at 7:30am this morning in order to save her from her increasingly indolent behavior.

Initially, she was outraged. She burrowed her head under the covers, snarling her preference to be allowed to sleep in.”I’ve got no reason to get up!” she moaned, fighting off his attempts to extricate her from her cocoon of sheets and comforters. “I’m disemployed! What do I have to get up for?”

“To live life!” he breathed, distracting her with gentle cheek kisses as he prepared to rip the bedding off of the lower half of her body. “To learn painting, or sculpture, or the harmonica!”

“What the hell are you talking about?” she demanded, rearing up in a fit of pique. “Go to work! Leave me alone!” They struggled with the comforter for an interval, then she sighed and ceded control to Mr. P, who promptly exposed her supine body to the chilly morning air.

“Fine, I’ll get up. I’m hungry. Make me some coffee and toast, okay?” she purred as she stretched and yawned like a lackadaisical house cat.