What's on my mind
I know what your buddy is going through, at least on the work end. Its scary to only know how to do a couple things in this world and then mid life have to learn to do another. I myself am going through career change #2 at 45 years old. It sucks. In the world we live in right now his best chance of finding anything decent is through a friend. Network, network, network, and then network some more. I had a similar experience with my ex wife, fortunately there were no little ones in our life, so that was a little easier.