A man named Sunil Krishman has an idea for a startup company that would create something important for Wisconsin and the economy: instant jobs in rural areas.

Logic would indicate that this is a project that is worth stimulating.

So I recently set off on a quest to find out who I should contact to show me a route to the start- up money the project needs.

I started with a call to the governor's office where my neighbor and acquaintance Susan Goodwin holds sway.

I didn't get her. I got instead the voice mail of her executive assistant, Mike. I told him what I wanted and left my number.

Two days later I called again. This time the person who takes calls at the governor's office told me that neither Mike nor Susan or anyone else in the east wing of the Capitol would have an answer to my question. She gave me the number of a state office with "recovery" in its name.

After two days worth of fruitless calling and leaving voice messages, serendipity struck. I was having coffee with a man who wants to run for lieutenant governor next year. I mentioned my frustration with the recovery office. He said he knew someone there and would make a call.

Sure enough the next day I got a call from a woman who told me that she couldn't help but that I should call the Department of Commerce. I did. I left a message.

A day later a man called me to say his department doesn't have any stimulus money except for "green" projects, but he might be able to help me. He would call back, he said.

In the meantime I had a visit with Democratic state Sen. Julie Lassa of the Stevens Point area and her staff. They liked the idea and wanted to include Sunil's plan in her effort to revive the vetoed "farmshore" provision in the budget. I thought at the time the reason it got vetoed was that the governor or his people couldn't figure out what "farmshore" was or meant. I didn't say so, but I did suggest that Sunil's concrete plan to bring IT functions that had been shipped all over the world back home might get a more favorable reaction from the governor with or without a more descriptive name.

In the course of this discussion, Julie gave me the name of a woman in Congressman Dave Obey's office in Wausau who might be helpful. I called her. She was out of the office. I left a message. She did not call back, but somebody else did. He told me the best routes to stimulus money were through the SBA or at the office of Rural Development in Stevens Point.

He didn't have a name there, but he gave me a phone number.

I called. The telephone tree said if I knew the extension of the person I wanted to talk to, I should dial it; if I didn't, I should hit 8 on my phone and get the agency's phone directory where I could enter the first three letters of the name of the person I wanted to talk to; if I didn't know that, I should stay on the phone and someone would answer.

No one did. Instead I kept getting the original telephone tree message over and over again.

So there I was with a number that went nowhere and no way to get past it.

I decided to call the Rural Development office in Madison and see if anyone there knew the name of anyone in the Stevens Point office. Luckily someone did. So I had three digits to enter when next I called and got -- wonder of wonders -- a human being instead of voice mail. It was, of course, not the human being who could answer my question but a human being who knew who could answer my question.

Justin Kirking was his name and he told me that the Rural Development office funds something like 40 programs -- none of which include a job- creating startup like the one I was pushing. He added the depressing information that like the SBA, they respond only to requests from banks.

Fortunately while I was waiting for phone calls to be returned and trying to find ways to get past phone tree dead ends I had sent the executive summary off to former Dane Co. Executive Rick Phelps of the M&I Bank on the long shot chance that someone at his institution might think this was instantly bankable. So that door was open, and I sent an addenda to my original request asking for the M&I's help with the feds and the SBA in particular.

All of this is a work in process at the moment, although given the banking industry's (a) problems and (b) indifference to the problems of companies like Sunil's, I am not sanguine.

In the meantime, Sunil is keeping Julie Lassa in the loop and hoping that she's able to revive her initiative so the state can put an oar in the water. I might even hear from the Department of Commerce.

If I live long enough.

-- Kraus is a longtime politico and campaign finance reform advocate who served in Gov. Lee Sherman Dreyfus' administration.

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