Tens of thousands of Americans have lost their jobs since the terrorist attacks. For the millions of others who still have jobs and have gone back to work, things are different now.

Workers make time to embrace and weep. They line up at factory gates, office buildings and parking-garage entrances, fishing for ID cards they had almost forgotten they had. They sit in front of their computer screens, only to find themselves looking nervously out the window at every passing jet.

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Flight attendant Cyndi Schulte wheeled her suitcase, along with a heavy load of misgivings, through the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport Friday morning.

Just hours earlier, her employer, Northwest, had announced 10,000 job cuts, joining most other airlines in slashing schedules and laying off workers because of a slowdown in air travel following the attacks.

But after 18 years on the job, Schulte said her biggest fear is that she won't be sent home.

''I feel I shouldn't be out here right now,'' Schulte said. ''I look at my passengers differently. I need to take some time to regroup.''

Schulte has applied for a five-month voluntary leave of absence offered by the airline. Despite her seniority, she fears she won't get it.

Others have decided they must forge ahead. Her colleague Peter Fiske said he has considered walking away from his career.

''But then I thought to myself, if I don't go back right away, I'm not sure I could ever go back,'' he said.

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Alarie Tennille makes her living writing Hallmark greeting cards designed to help people celebrate and to mourn. But this week, she and her co-workers at the Kansas City, Mo.-based company tried to maintain a strange balancing act - composing cards to commemorate the coming holiday season, even as they tried to suppress their own heartache.

''We are as wounded as most people in the country. It's overwhelming to try to write something to show sympathy and support when you're grieving yourself,'' Tennille said.

Tennille said it has been especially difficult to write cards that are supposed to be jolly, to focus on Santa Claus and snowmen when images of the World Trade Center flash in their minds.

''It's going to take awhile to process it,'' she said.

In the days since the attacks, Hallmark has asked its cardwriters to post inspirational passages on the company Web site. Tennille offered a poem about angels, originally written after her own mother's death, as a tribute to the emergency workers.

It reads: ''They performed their acts in human guise, sometimes borrowing the faces of family and friends, sometimes posing as well-meaning strangers. You have known them, too, when just the right word was needed, when a tiny act of kindness made a great difference.''

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Just two days after the Sept. 11 attacks, Jeannette Rosario and her colleagues at the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. were among the first workers to venture back to their desks in lower Manhattan.

Rosario, whose company processes the stock and bond transactions that make Wall Street go, picked her way through streets still blanketed with pulverized concrete. That night, after hours of laboring to help ready the company for the reopening of the stock markets on Monday, she slept in the office, then went back to work.

''You sit next to the window,'' she said, ''and keep on thinking, 'Am I going to turn around and see a plane coming?'''

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Hunting deep in northern Quebec, in country so remote there no roads, Tony Candela was barely keeping track of the time, much less the news back home. Candela, who heads United Auto Workers Local 136 in St. Louis, picked up the barest details of the attack on the World Trade Center from a pilot who dropped fresh supplies.

Not until five days later did he learn the enormity of what had happened. And when he returned to the job a few days after, he was stunned by the grim mood of fellow workers.

''I didn't really know the impact of what was taking place,'' said the Chrysler assembly plant worker, pondering questions on his first day back that most of his co-workers had been losing sleep over for a week. ''You ask yourself how this could happen to a country like this - terrorists using our own planes to kill our own people.''

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In Seattle, Gwen Scott-Miller, who works at the public library, said far more people have been come in asking for government reports, as well as any book about terrorism.

Before the attacks, an Osama bin Laden biography that had been on the shelves for three years had been checked out about a dozen times. This week, 65 people are on a waiting list for the book.

''The library reflects the world,'' Scott-Miller said.

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Until a few weeks ago, the 7,000 people who work in Boston's International Place office complex drove right into a parking garage, took an elevator upstairs and were at their desks in minutes - all without being questioned. But when computer consultant Tom O'Halloran arrived this week, he found everything had changed.

When O'Halloran pulled up to the garage, a guard at the gate told him he could park only if he worked in the building or had business there. The complex's security force, now tripled to about 25 guards watching over elevators and hallways, told O'Halloran and other workers they had to wear their IDs. Visitors must not only sign in, but wait for an escort to take them upstairs.

''It's worth doing,'' said office worker Richard Rollins. ''Nothing is a hardship at this point.''

O'Halloran said he, too, is glad about the extra security. But he added: ''It remains to be seen whether companies are going to want to pay for this permanently.''

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At Scarpas, Ray Vigil's Italian restaurant in Albuquerque, N.M., business seems to ebb and flow with each day's news.

''During the president's speech, this restaurant was basically empty,'' Vigil said Friday. But when the speech ended, ''there was a small rush.''

Vigil said he and his waiters are not too worried about a war or a downturn in the economy. Those are the times when people go out to eat in search of a little escape, as they did last weekend, he said.

''People got tired of watching television when the weekend rolled around,'' he said. ''We ended up having one of the biggest weekends we've ever had.''

But even as his customers seek to relax, Vigil said, the concerns of the day sometimes follow them in the door. In the days immediately following the attacks, many families came in and spent hours at tables talking about the attacks and the aftermath.

''That seemed to be the conversation at every single table,'' he said. ''That's what everybody needed. They just needed to talk about it.''

Associated Press writers Jim Suhr, Mia Penta, Craig Gustafson, Julie Aicher and Jeff Donn contributed to this report.