Jimmy Breslin will never be a media whore. That’s because he cares about ordinary people, not the Georgetown social scene.

A baby screamed in a stroller. The cry was contagious and now another screamed. A woman who was first in line at a window held a baby who yelled. She opened her shirt and breast-fed the baby.

Hundreds waited at the Queens Job Center at 32-10 Northern Boulevard in Long Island City yesterday. Those who weren’t here on Friday, when the building was closed for the blackout, and those scheduled for yesterday overloaded the center. There was a bank of windows, closed, with cardboard signs saying, “For Emergency Replacement of Food Only.” Another sign said, “If You Have Rent Arrears, Go to Rent Arrears Alert Window.”

“I’m here for a job,” Clarence Grant said. He lives in the Bronx Veterans Shelter. He is 44 and was in the Army. “No combat time. I’m peaceful time,” he said with a laugh.

“I have a Maryland license to drive trucks. I applied for job help and you got a 45-day period and I got a part-time job at Snapple, loading trucks. I wasn’t getting a check from here. Whatever, it was against the rules. They found me out. The investigators. Making five-fifteen an hour.”

“Who were they?”

“Investigators from the investigation.”

These were the people and their situation that government words such as “soft economy” and “unemployment figures” cannot describe because the words have no pain in them. What they don’t tell you is the child of about 8 who is midway in the fourth hour of walking through the crowds aimlessly, then going to his mother and crying and then, because the mother stares out and doesn’t really see him, he only cries louder. This is their life for yesterday and for all the days like it, days on which they spend the day waiting and then go home without a dollar of money or a word of hope. Their government does not know them, their news industry does not want to see them, and nobody really knows how many there are, except that there are a tremendous number.