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I caused a flurry by mentioning on Twitter and on my Facebook page that I had been to the local Job Centre to sign on.

Some of you were alarmed - or perhaps relieved. You thought Naga had finally taken charge / done the dirty on me / been recognised as the superior talent she is ( * delete as applicable).

Others spotted fairly quickly that this bit of attention-grabbing didn't quite tell the whole story.

Yes I was at the local job centre. But it was to make a report on what you need to do to sign on, rather than to claim unemployment benefit myself.

Unfortunately, the job centre is a place more and more people will have to visit in the months ahead.

The latest unemployment figures out this morning - show nearly 1.25 million people are now on the dole queue.

And the Bank of England has warned that the recession may be a lot worse than expected. It now thinks the economy could shrink by as much as 4 percent this year.

Which means - almost certainly - more lay-offs and redundancies. And more people visiting the dole office.

Some of those people claiming benefits will be visiting a job centre for the first time - or for the first time in a long time.

If my visit yesterday is anything to go by, it may not be as you expect.

When I last signed on - just after the last recession - there were long queues of people waiting to claim, or waiting to speak to advisers, or just waiting.

Even if you've never been inside yourself, you'll know what it looked like. You saw it in the news reports about unemployment in the early 90s and early 80s. You saw it during "The Full Monty" that film about unemployed Sheffield steel workers turned male strippers.

The modern job centre looks more like a building society than a grim bureaucratic shell.

The first thing you see is the welcome desk, where staff direct people to the advisers they need to see. The lobby is dotted with phones and computer terminals, so people can follow up job enquiries.

Behind all that stretches the open-plan office, divided by screens and partitions to provide a bit of privacy for "customers" meeting advisers.

And the racks of cards displaying the latest vacancies have been swept away, replaced by touch-screen "job points" so you can search for vacancies in the local area or across the country, in all trades or just your own.

Queues - officials insisted - are shorter, where they exist at all. Certainly, while I saw lots of people in the building I visited yesterday, few seemed to be waiting.

That's partly because you have to do quite a bit of homework before you arrive at the job centre.

If you lose your job, you don't just turn up unannounced to make your claim. The first thing you do is phone the Job Centre Plus helpline (the number is 0800 0 55 66 88).

They'll give you a date and time to visit your local job centre to discuss your claim, and how you might get back to work.

The call centre staff will also take some personal details and work out what benefits you might be able to claim.

If you've paid enough in National Insurance Contributions, you'll probably qualify for what we used to call Unemployment Benefit. Nowadays, in the jargon it's the less-snappy Contribution-based Job Seekers Allowance.

Otherwise you may be able to get the benefit that used to be known as Income Support - now renamed Income-based Job Seekers Allowance.

You may also be able to claim additional help with your mortgage, your council tax bill, the cost of prescriptions and dental treatment, or school meals.

Full details are available online at the Job Centre Plus website

The job centre staff I chatted to yesterday - many of them in the business for decades - say they're much better suited to cope with an economic slowdown now than they were in the 1990s.

They say their focus is on individual needs, not civil service procedure. And they say they have better links with businesses that need staff.

But there have been reports in some newspapers that job centres are struggling to cope with a rising tide of unemployed office workers, bankers and service staff. Angry articles have been written by frustrated professionals turned job seekers, who feel job centre staff don't understand the jobs they used to do - or what they need to get back to work.

As unemployment rises, their big test is yet to come. We'd be interested to hear your experiences.