Job hunting sucks. You have to keep giving, giving, giving, and until you get a job offer, you get nothing back. There's lots of rejection, unreturned phone calls, as you lose your sense of self worth with each passing day.

And then, your family, who does love you, tells you to do the unthinkable, yet again. Apply for a job as a maid. A maid?! A maid?! What is happening to my world?

Desperate times call for desperate measures. My poor brother had already forked out several thousand dollars to keep my children and I fed and under our own roof. It was a difficult situation at best. He loved us, but he and his wife were not prepared to continue to completely support another household, and I had no right to expect it. So, I started calling the local maid service companies.

Now here's the thing: With so many of my past interviews I'd been told time and time again that I was overqualified. And I was, and I knew it, and they knew it. And to a potential employer that means you get labeled as a risk.

And, who could blame them? They were right. Office jobs, secretarial stuff, assembly lines — one look at my resume and you know that this chick will not be with us long. I'm not bragging here. I am who I am, and that's a woman with 28 years of broadcast television experience in sales, production, news, and marketing.

But, lo and behold, a local franchise company took a risk and offered me the opportunity to scrub other people's toilets, stoves, floors, doors and baseboards along with mopping and vacuuming and a little light dusting. Please, who wouldn't want this job?

I started almost immediately. I arrived early. To make a good first impression I was spiffily dressed in my dark blue shorts and pink and white striped buttondown shirt with white socks and pristine white sneakers.

My boss paired me with his "killer" team — a mother and daughter who'd been with him for years. We took our clean pile of rags, our mop, vacuum cleaner, buckets, and cleansers and drove off. And what a drive it was. These women were from a different world. I had now stepped into the lives of multiple divorce, illegitimate children, barrel racing, trucks, and trailers.

Now, don't get me wrong. I wasn't being judgmental. After all, I'd just been living in a single wide myself less than a year ago. I just want you to get the full picture here.

The mother and the daughter team lived together in a single wide trailer with the boyfriend of the mother and the 21-year-old daughter's four-year-old son. Are you with me so far?

The mother was about 40. Her first grandson was four. Her daughters were 21, 19, 18, and 17. I was a 49-year-old divorced mother with a nine and a ten year old who could now add maid service to her resume. Was I moving up or what?

I will tell you this about that: In the three weeks I worked with these women and a few others very much like them, I learned to be grateful to have been raised in a middle class family, to have been made to go to college, and to have been made to understand that education and success go hand in hand. Uh, all current evidence to the contrary.

Thankfully, they fired me. "Too thorough and too slow," I believe, were my sited failures. On the bright side, I lost 15 pounds — I had never worked so hard in my life.