There are funny parts to being unemployed. One of my very favorites are the e-mails I get almost daily from mysterious addresses that announce “West Columbia Vice President/Editorial Page Editor Jobs.”

Then, of course, you follow the link and find that, alas, “The search for Vice President/Editorial Page Editor jobs in 29169 did not match any jobs.”

Welcome to the brave new world of computerized hiring. Apparently, somehow my title from the newspaper got stripped off a resume from one of the many jobs I’ve applied for online, and some service that someone is trying to sell me automatically plugs it into a database and just as automatically sends me this absurd e-mail, over and over again. And wonder of wonders, not once has there actually been a job for a vice president/editorial page editor in West Columbia a single time in the past year. If you can believe that.

You know, if ever an actual human intervened in that algorithm for two seconds, he’d say, Hmmm. There are probably no more than a handful of editorial page editors who are also vice presidents in the entire country, if any. Seems kinda doubtful that West Columbia, which doesn’t even house a single daily newspaper, would ever, ever have one.

But things like that don’t happen. In my experience, actual humans probably only look at applications before the first cut a little under 50 percent of the time these days. And that’s the unfunny side of computerized hiring. If you’re me, if you’re a guy whose specialty is leading a small, talented team in wrestling with the knottier public policy issues of the day (plus dealing with community and business and political leaders), you pretty much know that no algorithm ever written can look at my resume and infer the kinds of conclusions that might lead someone to think, OK, I don’t have any newspaper jobs open, but a guy with this kind of background could probably do this and this for me…

Only a human could possibly do that. So it’s pretty galling to get those notices, about an hour after applying, that say “We’ve examined your resume and concluded that you are not a good fit for us.” When you know it’s a machine.

My all-time favorite was a job that I heard about on the day before the deadline for applications. I rushed to get it in, complete with a thoughtful cover letter, etc. Hours later I got a message saying that my resume had been examined, and my qualifications looked like a good match, and they would be following up with me. This was very encouraging because it was an opportunity I was pretty excited about, and I was relieved to know I’d gotten in under the wire and would have the chance to make my case. It was obvious that the notice was computer-generated, that no human had yet seen my application, but I was thinking, Good software; must have been written by a real genius.

Then, three days later, I get another automated e-mail telling me that on further examination, I wasn’t such a good fit. And mind you, a human obviously hadn’t seen it yet. (Bad software, must have been written by an EVIL genius…)

So I got ticked off and started digging, asking around, getting names that led me to names, until I finally found a human who would sit down and chat with me. (My argument was that I didn’t think they’d want anyone who’d take “no” from a machine.) I didn’t get the job, but I was satisfied that I at least got to a human…