It was 1994 and the then prime minister, Paul Keating, had a problem.

Me.

I was about to graduate with an arts degree, smack-bang into the middle of the “recession we had to have”. With not much of a plan, I seemed destined to swell the ranks of those – as Tracy Chapman sang – “wasting time in the unemployment lines”.

I’d entertained tepid thoughts of applying for the public service, even going so far as to register for the national exam.

But, you see, our share house fridge had carked it. And on the day of the test, we got wind of a reconditioned one going cheap, and no other housemates could be found.

Fridge or job?

Well, there would be other job offers, I reasoned (hoped?). There might not be any other cheap white goods. So I blew off that exam and picked up the fridge.

It turned out my hopes had been well founded. Keating had concocted a cunning plan: employ dozens of new graduates as employment officers in the Commonwealth Employment Service to encourage – read badger – unemployed people into jobs, while keeping those new grads out of the already swollen dole queues at the same time. Everyone who’d registered for the exam got the offer.

With no other offers or better ideas, in 1995 I found myself behind the front counter of the CES, the government office founded in 1946, tasked with finding jobs for people and people for jobs.

Like everyone, I’d heard terms like “dole bludgers” and “welfare cheats”, and I went in with, I guess, some preconceived ideas.

In fact, most of the people I ended up meeting desperately wanted to work. But it was an employers’ market and they were just never the best person for the job. It was especially sobering for me; I felt how easily our places could have been reversed.

I also saw how people’s lives could spiral. They’d be doing OK, then lose a job, not pay the car insurance, have an accident. Without transport, it became 10 times harder to get work. I felt their vulnerability too. I barely had a fridge.

Luckily, I had a drawer full of resources – training programs, job subsidies, even bus tickets – to offer people, and I threw myself into trying to help my clients. I soon saw how these things could turn people’s lives around.

A cabinet maker originally from Hong Kong had been having a hard time getting an interview. I arranged a work experience placement, and two days later his wife called to say he’d been offered a job. “We are happy we can now contribute to Australia,” she said.

I helped another woman with interview training and a job-winning retail management CV. I only saw her once more; she came to give me a pen engraved with my name. We both blinked back happy tears.

Not that everyone I dealt with was excited about working.

“I just go to work, come home, watch TV, and do it all again the next day,” one client working as a carer told me, pretty much describing my own life.

“It’s a first step, it will get better,” I said, not sure if I was reassuring him or myself. That was my expectation for me – that I’d go on to something more interesting and fulfilling.

But there were people who took work in chicken processing plants, in the abattoir. There were always some vacancies, even in a recession. I realised not everyone might have the chance at a fulfilling job. I wondered if they were happy there – or what else might have been possible with a bit of help.

While the system was sometimes helpful, it was also coercive. People had to take any “reasonable” job. Turn up to appointments. Do whatever else the legislation said. And if they didn’t, I had the power to cut their unemployment payments off.

I like to think I used that power humanely. When a woman came in sobbing, because of the racial abuse she’d suffered on a construction site, I gave her tissues, not a hard time.

Meanwhile, when young people spent their days playing video games and smoking bongs – you can smell both, trust me – we’d make them turn up for interviews at 9am every day. Faced with the hassle of us, or the hassle of training or working, most of them eventually chose the second option. Was it better from their perspective? I don’t know.

We at least put on a VHS tape of Mr Bean to entertain people while they waited. The whole line – refugees, single mothers, young or old, arts graduates – would ripple with laughter at the same moments.

But possibly my greatest amazement I saved for my new toy: a computer. One on every desk! I could send messages – to any other CES officer. And get replies – straight away! I was at the “coalface” of our social services system and the digital revolution, all at once.

Just a few years later, after more than 50 years of service, this institution would be gone.

In 1996 Keating joined the unemployment line himself, ousted by John Howard. By 1998 CES functions had been broken up through the largest public tender of human services in Australia’s history at that time. Many of the resources we had were cut and while government congratulated itself on the “cost savings”, we wondered what to do with the clients standing in front of us.

Over time, those computers meant that waiting rooms with quaint videos could be replaced by little black phone screens and hours on hold, with clients and staff alike measured in KPIs and targets. Eventually, of course, came robodebt, and then a royal commission to understand what had gone so terribly wrong.

I didn’t, despite the ace computers, end up working at the CES long enough to see all of this – although my stint was still longer than that fridge worked.

In the 30 years since, I have had more interesting jobs and better appliances. I even own an air fryer now. But I still think often of the things I learned on that front counter. What a privilege it is to have a fulfilling job. Never to judge. That many of us are just an accident away from financial catastrophe. And that the right help at the right time – even from a well-meaning if naive graduate – can make all the difference. I still have the pen to prove it.

Time on the unemployment line, anything but wasted.

• Jay Martin is a writer who works on Noongar Boodja. She survived stints in commonwealth, state and local governments. Her most recent novel is Boom Town Snap (Fremantle Press)