And now, TIVO-ahead and now I am even blogging, mostly instead of building birdhouses or playing bridge. Anyway….

Recently, I went back home to central Kansas for a family reunion. My cousin Craig is a farmer and his main problem, he tells me—the “employment media expert”—is that no matter what he does, no matter where he advertises, he simply cannot find anyone who wants to move to smalltown Kansas to do farmwork. He pays well, $50,000 to $80,000/year, free health care and will even let the worker live in a house, for free no less. I wrote about it here.

Talk about the power of technology and the new media, and how it helps us all make connections. I am in Minnesota, Craig is in Nowhere, Kansas. As in, have you ever lived four full hours from an airport, Nowhere?

Thiago, a 24-year old Brazilian, reads my blog down in Miami, Florida. Thiago, who holds an MBA from IBMEC in Sao Paulo, recently lost his job and was looking. “I want something more basic,” he tells me, “I don’t like the Miami lifestyle.” Turns out Thiago’s grandfather is a corn farmer like Craig. Brazil-ethanol, corn-ethanol, remember? Thiago invites me to join his LinkedIn group, nice kid. This has the sounds of a truly international story and yes, he has his HB1.

And then I am emailed a very nice letter from a guy in Iowa who is ready to move his young family to Kansas, he has loads of experience, understands the farm life and wants to work for Craig, also. He has a hard luck story, which I always fall and feel for. This business can be so personal, it is almost overwhelming. It makes you want to take the jobseeker by the hand and lead him directly to the next job.

Then another young man from Florida emails me, mostly about his hard luck life (his girlfriend left him, his brother was killed) and how this is the opportunity he has been waiting for…can he please, please prove himself to Craig, no one will work harder he says. He has to get out of there. I believe him but he also needs an advance on gas money to get up there.

So there’s three personal stories out of more than a dozen I received. They all want to work, most of them with no farm experience, just hardworkers who are convinced this is THE opportunity for them.

For a while, I can’t get Craig on the phone. He does live in Kansas, after all, and you will recall that the main character in Wizard of Oz was not Dorothy of Kansas, but a Kansas tornado. Yep, you guessed it, his farm was hit by a tornado and then a night later, by a 45-minute, golfball-sized hailstorm. Nearly 1,000 acres of knee-high corn now look like my front yard, freshly mowed, talking about it he sounds just awful. Actually, shell-shocked is a better term.
So, finally, there are actually four hard luck stories. Is this a news story or what?