I left my job in the San Francisco Bay Area last April and moved to my permanent home in Lake County. My spouse had passed away from lung cancer the previous year and it was time to come home, find a job not too far away and start a new life. Little did I know that move would lead straight to online hell.

Job hunting these days means sitting in front of your computer for endless hours and uploading resumés and filling out job applications … online. Even the well-intentioned folks at the Employment Development Department will advise you to “go to indeed.com or edjoin.com or caljobs.com or ___.com” No people are involved. All job vacancies lead to a Web page.

These are job sites that take their listings from other job listings like Monster.com or Hotjobs.com that take their listings from … well, you get the idea. Often the job you’re interested in no longer exists. If the job does exist, you are told to “Apply Now.” That usually means you have to upload your resumé to their Web site. Your resumé is then added to a giant database of resumés that include thousands of job applicants from all over the nation if not all over the world.

Once in a while, a job listing will actually take you to a company’s Web site. That just happened to me. I found out Oracle Corp. has job openings at their facility near Ukiah, not too far from Lake County. Hallelujah! Progress at last!

So I clicked on the “Apply Now” button. Once at the Oracle iRecruitment Web site, I uploaded my resumé, then was asked to copy and paste potions of the resumé to their own application. Except that once finished, the job matches included positions all over the world, including Bangalore, India. Mmmm … too far away from Lake County.

Five minutes later, I received an email from Oracle iRecruitment asking me to click on a link to verify my registration on their Web site or my registration would be deleted. Except that the link didn’t work. So I emailed my ISP. Tech support said it wasn’t at their end and to contact Oracle informing them that the link didn’t work. So I did. And the next dsay received a response in German.

I long for the days when you could walk into a company or employment agency not far from where you lived and hand them your resumé. It was nice to be acknowledged, to be able to look into the eyes of another human being and discuss the possibilities.

Gloria Hovde lives in Lower Lake.

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