finding a particular record within a MySQL result set

I've cross posted this to the MySQL list... Here's my original post.

Is there some quick way to do the following in MySQL? (I know I can use PHP to search through the result set, but I wanted to see if there's a quick way using some sort of query) Let's say I know that Joe is from Maine. I want to do a query of all employees from Maine, ordered by hiring date, and figure out where Joe falls in that list. (i.e. which record number is he?) -James

Here's my new plan of attack... Right now I'm trying to use PHP to do a binary search on the result set so I don't have to traverse the entire result set. I'm using PHP's mysql_data_seek() to move the pointer within the result set and looking at the data to do the necessary comparisons. What do people think of this approach? -James