FACES OF THE BANKRUPTCY : JEFF YAUGHER, 32, ORANGE

They were all Orange County employees until the bankruptcy opened a trapdoor beneath them, sending their lives tumbling into uncertainty. The Times told the stories of 50 such workers in March. One year after the bankruptcy, we revisit eight of them below.

Jessica Yaugher told her father she wanted only one thing when her fourth birthday rolled around last month.

“She told me she wanted Daddy to have his job back,” Jeff Yaugher said. “And that just about killed me. She knows I’ve been hurting. But to hear her say that. . . .”

It has been 10 months since Yaugher’s inventory control job for the General Services Agency was wiped out in the wake of the Orange County bankruptcy, and still there is no new work in sight. The family savings are eroding, along with a measure of his self-confidence. He wonders why some of his fellow workers have been called back while he has not.

“I keep hoping that I can get the job back with the county. . . . After all this time, I don’t know why, though,” said Yaugher, who now tends to the family home and looks after Jessica, 4, while his wife works as a retail store manager. “The market is tough. Real tough.”

The $26,000-a-year job he had with the county gave Yaugher more than an income. The communications supply warehouse was full of friends, and working with the supply end of the county’s vast emergency communications network was a daily thrill for the ham radio enthusiast. The shipments he would order and oversee included phone booth-size repeaters and transistors no larger than a fly’s head.

“I loved my job, I just loved it,” Yaugher said. He began working for the county when he was 17, a young man elated to find a job that seemed to promise both security and extensive promotion opportunities.

“I thought I was set. I was just wrong.”

Some days seem to drift away now for Yaugher. He busies himself making Jessica’s meals and guiding her through alphabet lessons on the family computer. He finds a welcome escape with his ham radio hobby, chatting and joking with friends across the region.

His search continues for another warehouse management or inventory control job, but the prospects of finding one quickly appear grim.

Making the ordeal more difficult, Yaugher said, is watching some county leaders and officials escape the bankruptcy crisis more or less unscathed.

“Mismanagement and irresponsibility, that’s what led to all of this,” Yaugher said. “But they’re not paying the price, we are. It just doesn’t seem fair. We had nothing to do with it.”

Despite 10 years’ service, Yaugher knew he would likely lose his job when the cutbacks hit. He had been an employee for six years and then left for a different job. His second stint lasted one year, cut short by a motorcycle accident. He bounced back from that and returned for a third tenure, but the books showed him as a just a three-year employee when the news came that there would be layoffs.

“There was just a chain of events I had no control over.”

Yaugher said he doesn’t dwell on bad luck or bitter thoughts because he and his wife have far more pressing concerns. They have cut back greatly on their expenses and expect a scaled-back holiday celebration this year. The couple rarely go out, he said, and they have long since canceled their daughter’s day-care program, which was too pricey at $320 a month.

The time Yaugher now spends with Jessica seems to be the sole positive of his layoff, but he added that even that has a downside.

“She should be spending time with kids her age, she needs that exposure to peers,” he said. “And her dad, of course, should be working.”