A friend of mine - let's call her Gill - was one of six directors recently made redundant by a well-known UK consortium. Once she'd recovered from the initial shock of losing a post that she had held for 18 years, Gill set out to find another.

She knew it would take time and someone advised her to register as unemployed so that her national insurance contributions would be paid. So, like you, me or any raw school-leaver, she googled “job centre” and phoned the number on the website. She was given an interview slot at a local centre and told not to be late.

There follows a tale of such humiliation, misunderstanding and Stalinist bureaucracy that, on reading it, the shivers will run up the spine of every white-collar worker in the land. When Gill turned up at the given address, she found that the Jobcentre had been relocated to another part of town. By the time she found the new office, she was five minutes late and had missed her slot. “They made me sit on the naughty chair for a bit,” Gill said.

The young woman who interviewed her was ignorant but condescending in manner and kept asking Gill why she was there. She was told that in order to get her national insurance paid, she would have to apply for job seeker's allowance, which she did not want.

There was no privacy in the room. All around her, Gill could hear other sad citizens getting the third degree. The offical asked Gill what she used to earn, and then - unbelievably - repeated the figure to nearby colleagues, exclaiming: “Hey, I've never had anyone in here with that salary!”

Things went from humbling to comic. Gill's circumstances did not fit any of the boxes on the official's computer screen. And if she defied classification she could not exist. “Tell me what your job was and I'll do a job search for you,” said the official. “Operations director for a Footsie plc,” said Gill. “It's not coming up with anything. What about ‘area manager'?” “Yes,” sighed my friend, by this time a broken woman, “area manager will do.”

Gill must prove that she was looking for work. “You have to send off three job applications a week and you need to keep an exercise book of what you are doing,” said the official. “Have you got an exercise book?” “Yes,” whimpered the woman, who had once managed thousands of staff and a budget of millions.

“Then she told me that she couldn't really do anything for me and I was told to report back ten days hence,” said Gill.

My friend, who is in her forties, went away and did what senior executives do, phoning, networking. On the day she was supposed to return, someone invited her for a speculative interview. She called the Jobcentre to tell them. They told her she must fax proof of whom she was seeing and where. “But it's informal,” she said. “I have nothing to fax.”

“If you don't provide those details it will invalidate your claim,” they warned her. Sure enough, a week later she received a formal letter confirming that they were taking back £50 of contributions.

The parable has a happy ending, for Gill at least. Within two months she managed, through initiative and contacts, to create another senior post for herself within a big company.

But for thousands of white-collar workers who will, as sure as night follows day, follow in her footsteps, the story will not be so happy. How many, in the dark days of middle-class recession to come, will experience similar treatment from a system that is not so much hostile as simply alien?

There was, apparently, no one at the Jobcentre that Gill visited who was experienced in dealing with her circumstances. She felt strongly enough about it to write to Harriet Harman, but has not received a reply. “I amuse myself thinking, what if it had been her? If they did a job search for her - Cabinet minister or secretary of state - they'd probably come up with cabinet maker or office secretary.

“As a businesswoman, I could see a system crying out for reform. They need to step up a gear. They need people working there with a commercial background; they need to make the boxes on the computer system more flexible; they need to retrain everyone. They need basic stuff like links on the government website about paying national insurance contributions.”

Recently, it was suggested that the Government was thinking of asking universities to step in to provide facilities and to counsel senior jobless people. Meanwhile, companies sacking executives are spending up to £10,000 a head on job placement consultancies as part of their redundancy package. Such firms, which prepare CVs and seek out unadvertised jobs, are - as my friend also discovered - pretty useless. “Chocolate teapot. I found another job by myself,” she said.

Bright, thrusting high-achievers have been warned. Should you fall from grace, through no fault of your own, do not expect the State to offer you a safety net. Just appreciate the ultimate irony: you could build and run a better system yourself. Funny, isn't it, when that's what governments are for?

Times Recommends

• Bank charges hit us for being human
• Sorry, Father, thou still shalt not steal
• The shed where Santa’s failures go to die