ALL OVER Maryland, the lines are forming and the job seekers are putting in their claims. It's a beautiful thing to see. The job seekers claim to know somebody, or they claim to have been generous when it counted. Sometimes, they even claim to have skills. This gets us to the mayor named Tommy D'Alesandro Jr. and the political boss named Jack Pollack, who were smart enough to know better.

D'Alesandro was mayor for three terms, and Pollack was a political boss forever. You can still hear the echoes of their conversations today, from a distance of no more than half a century. Or you can witness the modern replays in Baltimore County, where the newly elected county executive, Jim Smith, is already facing down his County Council; or in Annapolis, where the friends of Parris Glendening wish to stick around and the wanna-be friends of Robert Ehrlich are so abundant that the cops had to be called in.

With D'Alesandro and Pollack, two men from a simpler era, the game was played with a wink instead of a resume. D'Alesandro ran City Hall, but Pollack ran the Trenton Democratic Club, out of Northwest Baltimore, which helped put Tommy into office. Naturally, there would be heartfelt thanks for the help. It's the way the game was played all over town. One day, Pollack called D'Alesandro to ask for his little piece of the action.

"I've got a couple of guys I want you to put on the city payroll," Pollack said.

"What do they do?" D'Alesandro asked.

"Do?" replied Pollack, astonished by a question that had never previously reached his ears, or his consciousness. "They don't do anything."

"Good," said D'Alesandro. "Then we won't have to break 'em in."

Thus we have some of the delightful shorthand of democracy in action. "What do they do?" Is that really important? Sometimes. And sometimes, what matters is the political connection, the campaign contribution when it was most appreciated.

We see this now in Annapolis, where the friends of Gov.-elect Robert Ehrlich have already slipped more than a thousand job resumes into what they hope will be the right hands. In fact, the Washington Post reported, to prevent hordes of job seekers from overrunning Ehrlich's transition office, the Republicans brought in an armed police officer for crowd control.

There are an estimated 5,000 appointments to state boards and commissions, and probably a few thousand more patronage jobs available.

But the jobs getting the most attention are three now held by well-known Democrats being accused by Republicans of "fishy" connections between their new employment and their contributions to the departing Governor Glendening.

They are, as detailed yesterday by The Sun's Michael Dresser: departing Baltimore Sen. Perry Sfikas, who gave Glendening $6,000 in August and was appointed to an $81,000 position on the state Parole Commission in September; departing Baltimore County Del. Thomas E. Dewberry, named the state's chief administrative law judge, at $101,000, who gave $5,000 to Glendening; and departing Baltimore County Sen. Michael J. Collins, who donated $10,000 to the Democratic Governors' Association, which is headed by Glendening. Collins gave the money May 9 and got his new job, a $97,344 position on the state Board of Contract Appeals, a week later.

Then, in early September, Collins gave $6,000 in leftover campaign funds to Glendening. Why would the governor need such money then? He was financing a series of political commercials against William Donald Schaefer.

In the shadow of such controversy, the newly elected Baltimore County executive, Jim Smith, heads toward an apparent confrontation with his County Council. The issue is who will control appointments of the county's top managers, Smith or the council.

Meanwhile, anyone with a copy of our favorite newspaper can turn to the Market Place classified advertisement section, where there were no fewer than 20 columns of job listings yesterday. The hungry job seeker could find listings in construction and electrical work, in mortgage banking and in sales, in plumbing and in groundskeeping.

Under Help Wanted-Politics, there was nothing. These jobs are offered in a separate section of the marketplace. Sometimes, skill is required. Sometimes, the right connection, the proper cash contribution. Such a process arrives at the end of a gubernatorial campaign in which roughly $20 million was collected and spent by the two major candidates, and millions more spent in local races.

And this is why we get, in the parlance, the best government money can buy.