The Cynical Career Counsellor

But it won't all be bake sales and battered wives. No, you're going to end up probably working for some two-bit "alternative" radio station that doesn't get all its commercials from a network feed. Maybe you'll write little ditties for ethically grown coffee for the "Lesbian Poet's Corner" or a catchy jingle about safe sex for "Percussion Only". Whatever they give you to work on, you'll be gratified to know that the 20 people listening probably appreciate it, and your below-minimum wage paycheque will merely cover the stamps you use to apply for real jobs.

You see, you won't have a minimum wage because you're self-employed. If you actually owned any assets, like a car, you would be able to depreciate them for tax purposes. All you'll have is an outdated computer that you use to ghostwrite 1st-year university papers for a little extra cash.

Still, hard work may pay off, and after a few years of poverty, if you don't quit, you might get a job at a small newspaper or a commercially successful radio or television station. There you can leave behind socially responsible angst accompanied by chanting goddesses, and move into more traditional jingles for used car dealers and real estate agents. The trick will be keeping them fresh. There are only so many words that rhyme with "sale", after all. You'll also become well versed in other copywriting techniques, such as the "booming echo": THIS SUNDAY! SUNDAY! SUNDAY! EVERY USED CAR MUST GO BEFORE MONTH END INVENTORY—AMAZING SAVINGS! SAVINGS! SAVINGS!

Your work will be fulfilling only in that it pays you enough to get by—you won't brag about your masterpieces in most social circles. One day you'll meet the girl of your dreams, and your packaged charm will come in handy. You'll sweep her off her feet with love poems and songs, but a few weeks after you announce your engagement she'll discover a digital archive of all your old commercial ditties. The confrontation won't be pretty:

"Hey Dan," (your name is Dan, right kid?) she'll say, "Those things you said in your proposal—you said the exact same thing about a self-cleaning oven at Sears two years ago. 'Warm and secure' my ass," she'll mutter and then go on a rant about how she can't trust your praises of her worth when you called lime cola "the greatest innovation since the printing press".

That sad episode will prove to you that you've lost your soul to advertising—and even when you do find a lesser mortal who will agree to marry you, you still will have to go through life being doubted by friends, your children and your workmates. Nobody believes a shill, my friend.

You'll have to do all the basic grease monkey wannabe stuff—put in the hours during high school and go for apprenticeships right after—you'll have to work in a regular garage for a little while you wait to be accepted, but eventually, maybe you'll get in if your grades, references and bribes all fall within the appropriate range. It won't be easy—there are way more parts on a 747 than on your average Hyundai, and if you botch up the car, it doesn't plunge 350 people to a fiery death.

The social life isn't that great; you think you'll have prestige, but the first time you get brushed off by a stewardess will teach you otherwise—heck, you put Brad Pitt in a set of blue coveralls with his name in the little red oval on the front and they wouldn't even give him the time of day. It's okay—you'll be so busy logging overtime that you'll get to know all the concession ladies well, and when their marriages collapse, you'll pick up the crumbs that fall off the table.

You'll never be able to relax in your job—even your basic Cessna is a delicate instrument—so you never get to have an “off” day. You will need to learn everything there is to know about simple prop engines and advanced jet aircraft. Then, if you are fortunate enough to work your way from the hellhole bush plane outposts into a major commercial airport, you'll also have to learn to play amateur secret agent. You see, you are one of the last lines of defense against the terrorists' plots to blow planes out of the sky. You must be able to look at an engine and tell if something doesn't look quite right.

You're also going to be the scapegoat if something awful happens—and at some point in your career, it probably will. Face it, they aren't going to insult the pilot's memory and offend his family by publishing the discovery that he had 6 martinis before he crashed the plane full of orphans into the side of the mountain—it will be blamed on "mechanical error" and that's you, bucko. When that happens, you'll be out of a job, and eventually the military will find you—they'll know the real story, and make you an offer you'll be desperate enough to take—fixing helicopters and transport planes in some crappy desert airbase until some would-be martyr blows up enough of your anatomy to qualify you for a disability pension.

You'll do like all the wannabe antique dealers—you'll become the hated "early bird" who cruises around the night before garage sales, harassing people into letting you see their stuff before the rest of the public gets a look. Some will refuse, of course, and some may even hit you—have a good lawyer prepared to make some money there—but many will let you look. You'll keep your real feelings hidden as you dismiss their junk as trash, then pause as you're about to get into your car, and halfheartedly offer them a fraction of what the Chippendale cabinet is worth.

Finds like that will be rare, and once you open your shop, you’ll want to cultivate a refined image—so you'll hire a team of garage sale sharks who do the hunting for you—your training gives them an eye for the good stuff.You’ll build your business, but slowly—there's too much competition and not enough good pieces around. Then you hit upon a brainstorm.

The retirement homes and extended care hospitals in your community are sorely under funded. These are the holding pens for the soon to be dead—to you, the soon to be estate sales. Your competition also read the obits—but then it's a battle to scoop the best pieces from the bereaved while they haven't time to check values. But at the care home you can make a connection first.

You will sponsor the small buses that ferry the codgers to their weekly outings—making sure your support is acknowledged. You and your staff start paying visits and holding small social gatherings where you figure out whose places will hold the best loot. Rather than keep all that stuff in storage, you tell them, and their beneficiaries, why not sell it ahead of time and enjoy the cash in this life?

Your ambition, however, remains without bounds—you borrow way too much to build a new store, and when the bank threatens to foreclose, you turn to organized crime for a quick but expensive loan. A few months later, when you can't pay them back, the mafia offers you an alternative to crushed fingers and eventual death—counterfeit antiques.

Your arrogance gets you caught sooner than you'd hoped, and you plead ignorance as to the origin of the fake—but it's too hot to keep trying that game, so the mob offers you another chance. This time you'll have to ship furniture all over the globe—they’ll finance your new internet antique company—but in return you’ll have to ingeniously hide drugs and all manner of other contraband in the pieces you send away.

It's probably enough to keep you successful and alive for at least three or four years—but eventually, prison cell chic will be your only decor.

Hey—whaddya think this desk is worth?

Oh hey, kid—what? Archaeologist? Oh right, that Indiana Jones marathon was on this weekend, wasn't it? Okay—first of all, you'll be confused. If you're in the states, they'll spell your job without the middle "a"—so you've got to decide if you'll spell it British and look pretentious in the U.S., or spell it American, and look ignorant in the U.K.—depends which foundations you're sucking up to for grant money—I'd go with pretentious.

Anyway—you'll travel to dusty, out of the way places which are just too hot, too cold, or just too dangerous—either filled with every tropical disease known to man, overrun with poisonous insects and reptiles, or simply governed by evil, corrupt military juntas who see archaeologists as useful only as bribe providers. If you end up in a fundamentalist Islamic regime, you'll likely be one of the kidnap victims pleading for your life on video.

No, it's only another damned rock. At night you'll drink whatever cheap hooch you scrounged at the little supply store 50 miles away. You get a real shower about once a month when you head back for supplies and the occasional drinking binge.

There's no pension in your pay picture—the grant money is not reliable—and you spend as much time writing grant requests as you do searching for your little arrowheads. After a while, you get tired of living off the good will of foundations and research councils, and you take a spot at a university.

First of all, you'll go to school and fill your head with idealistic visions of great and inspiring creations—buildings that make urban blight a thing of the past—buildings with heart and passion. Then you'll get your first job. You won't get to actually design a building—someone else is in charge of that—you get to look after all the washrooms—all 34 of them—in an office building. No problem, you think, your creativity will shine even there. Then your boss explains that none of your fancy marble and brass will do—it's melamine counters, and vinyl-covered drywall.

Time passes—you don't get to do dream houses, urban renewal, or museums—but you do get to design your own projects—strip malls. You know, the little ones with the liquor store, the 99-cent crap mart, a payday-loan joint and some no-name coffee shop. Maybe a sub stop and a pet store—if you're lucky.

You dream of making a difference, but there's no money in that—besides, your take on basic bland is popular. You try to sneak in your artistry and creativity—but the project managers explain that your venetian tiling is too expensive, or the engineers point out that your fancy clock tower doesn't conform to new earthquake safety standards.

Eventually you hate leaving your home, because everywhere you go your mediocre buildings mock your dreams. More and more of your clients have home drafting and design software packages and bring their ill-informed and irrelevant ideas to you. You are barely able to restrain your desire to throttle them with your bare hands.

You’ll finally save enough money to realize your dream of designing and building your ideal home—but then your boss—who is hinting that you will be a full partner in the company if you continue to impress him—will explain that his present to you for your years of loyal service is to bring all of his architectural genius and experience to the job of creating your dream home. You struggle to take control, but he won't take no for an answer. To hold on to a job you secretly despise, you’ll end up letting him design an abomination—it will get a few curious and unenthusiastic reviews in some architectural journals, and though you loathe it, you can never move—unless you want to give up your job security, and you’ll have invested too much in that to let it go.

I've seen your application to art school, but I've seen a lot of others as well. That guy with the dreads who works in the video store across the road from the school—he's been to art school. The woman who fills the vending machines—same with her. It doesn't have to be that way with you, though. It could go like this:

You'll arrive at art school idealistic—you are going to be the refreshing breath of life that will excite both your teachers and fellow students alike—you're sure of it. The first few weeks challenge your perception of your own superiority, and you notice that other students don't hear the professor's criticism as often as you do. Soon you're doubting your most basic of instincts, struggling to choose the medium that suits your vision, and trying to find the most inconspicuous work space in the classroom. Other students occasionally invite you to join their group for a drink after class, but you stay to work on your "exciting new idea". You almost don't notice them catch each others' eyes and smirk as they walk away.

The first semester ends and you are called into the advisement office, where two of your instructors explain that maybe you aren't quite suited to a life of art. You blink back the tears as they try to soften the impact of their words. You realize, for the first time in your life, that at that moment you could take the life of another human being—two, in fact—in a fit of rage. But you push the feeling back inside long enough to actually shake their hands and stagger out into the unfriendly world.

You take a job at the coffee shop across the road from the art college. It seems crazy to the other students—so close to your shame—yet in the back of your mind, you realize the damage a rifle pointed out the coffee shop's supply room window could do to the pretentious crowd of successful students whose art the teachers didn't hate.

While you plan your blood-soaked revenge, you take a college extension writing course, and are almost shocked to discover that your teacher sees 'great potential' in your writing.

For extra credit, you’ll agree to help out with the college newspaper, and in a fortuitous turn of events, you end up taking over the column of the paper's arts critic when she graduates. You struggle but manage to write meaningful commentary on local movie festivals, plays, or indie rock acts, but your words flow effortlessly when you get the chance to attend the regular art shows staged to display the talents of your former rivals back at the art school. At first you try to be cautious in your criticism—poke tiny holes in the egos of your enemies so you won't seem so transparent in your hatred—but you’ll soon realize that success lies in the occasional annihilation of some young hopeful. You give the occasional positive review—but save them for the quiet ones who didn't snicker at your "Self-Portrait in Cheese".

Your column gets noticed. It's flattering when the local newspaper picks it up for their weekend arts section, and not long after come offers, attractive ones, to go to a bigger paper in a bigger city. You turn them all down. You need to be where you can do the most damage. You bide your time, waiting for your opportunity, and then it comes. Your first art college instructor, a middle-aged painter whose nervous breakdown ten years earlier put his own art career on hiatus, has ventured back into his first love—oil painting. A local gallery is the site of your revenge. You actually park your car across from his house and wait until you see him go to the gallery so he can witness your visit to his collection. You pause at different works, sigh, cluck and make scribbled notes to yourself. You see him looking worried out of the corner of your eye—twice he moves to approach you, but stops.

I know you—your locker's just across the hall from this office. Yeah, while those other boys have all those swimsuit models stuck in their lockers, you've got those muscle car pictures—probably something Freudian going on there, and I'm sure a psychoanalyst would have a field day with it, but my job isn't to diagnose your problem; I just need to tell you how to make a living from it.

You won't find a lot in our school auto shop—it's all about the mechanics and you're all about the cosmetics. Soon you'll be skipping out to go do joe jobs for the body shop down the street, and it's more relevant than anything you can learn here. There's something satisfying about putting the big suction thing on a compressed panel and pulling it back to shape, or in seeing a crappy looking primer wagon turn into something red and shiny.

After you serve your time as a minimum wage peon, you'll eventually win an apprenticeship. You'll learn about the different qualities of paint, when to repair a fender and when to simply replace it. You'll also learn about safety equipment—the goggles and the ventilator that you're supposed to wear when spray painting cars—but you know the old pros in your shop will laugh at you if you come in looking like some Darth Vader wannabe so you put that information in the "forget it after the test” file. When you're 40 and coughing up blood you'll wonder about the wisdom of that decision.

You stay on with the same shop once your apprenticeship is complete, but your old boss retires and he sells it to a shady guy who already owns a couple of other shops in the area. Nothing changes too much except you notice the lights on more when you drive by late at night, and you're told not to ask dumb questions about the origin of some of the replacement parts that show up in unmarked vans.

It doesn't take long for you to understand what's going on in the shop is often on the wrong side of legal, and your employer and his associates make it clear that telling anyone would be even worse for your health than the metal-flake carcinogens you inhale in the paint room daily. Car theft is at an all time high, and the demand for efficient and discrete "chop-shops" has grown accordingly. Soon you're part of a team that can dismantle a Porsche or BMW in under an hour.

You aren't exactly sure when you became an accessory to crime, but you only report the legal half of your actual income and you find yourself feeling uncomfortable when you pull up beside a police car at traffic lights. Then, you make a crucial miscalculation that changes your life.

Your boss comes in quite upset about something and calls you away from the '68 Camaro you're painting with special instructions. There's a car coming in right after closing, and you're to stay late and completely dismantle it on your own. You agree, but in your head you're thinking about the fact you've got your third date with a cute girl you met at a bar a couple weeks before—what with all the skipping school and looking at car pictures you were a bit of a late bloomer in the dating game—and you decide you'll just come in early the next day, a Saturday when the shop is closed, and take care of it.

Unfortunately, when you arrive early Saturday morning, the police are already executing their warrant. The car you were supposed to have disposed of is towed into the evidence garage, where the blood and other evidence it provides helps put away your boss for 15 years. From the muttered threats you hear while the cops are scouring the shop, you quickly realize that getting out of town is your only chance of survival.

You spend the next few years wandering from place to place, taking jobs for cash in small bodyshops so as to avoid showing up on any computers where friends of the mob could track you down. You never form any meaningful connections with people, and the loneliness is agonizing. Then one day you give a ride to a young woman you meet in a highway diner and she invites you to the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert.

You are amazed at what you find baking in the middle of nowhere. It's like a cross between Mardi Gras and the Mad Max movies, and in a fit of artistic inspiration, you pull out your torch and welding kit and turn your old pickup truck into something that draws rave reviews from old and young burnouts alike. For the first time you feel safe and happy, surrounded by next generation hippies who introduce you to the pleasures of peyote and invite your advice on their bizarre motorized sculptures.

As the festival winds down, you're invited to a number of different wilderness communes, and decide your best chance of happiness is to stick with Unity, the girl who brought you there in the first place. She's almost 20 years your junior, but you feel younger and happier than you have in ages and can even feel hopeful about the future for a change.

Unfortunately, you didn’t realize that "Woodstock Charlie", with his dirty bandanna and scraggly beard, was actually Carlo "The Fixer" Giavisi—the mob was very happy to supply the festival goers with all the mescaline they needed, and Carlo realized after the first day who you really were, which gave him time to call in the help needed to finish you off.

Your only chance will be your newfound friends. The mob is out of its element in the desert and when the black SUVs show up, your well-honed paranoia kicks in. You tell a few of your followers what's going on, and they rally around you. It's a surreal scene as dirty potheads driving a variety of vehicles that might have escaped from a Dr. Seuss book shoot the few shotguns they own at gangsters who can't really tell which one is you. They're under orders not to kill indiscriminately as the negative publicity might lead to a crackdown on the unfettered festival that provides them with such a good annual drug market.

In the confusion you escape, but you receive a small cut from a rusty edge of your truck sculpture, and while hiding in a remote commune with Unity, your untreated tetanus almost kills you before you seek medical help. Unfortunately, the shootout in the desert attracted more attention than you realize, and the police show up at your hospital bed to arrest you for your years of chop shop work.

Your plea bargain involves testifying against more of your former colleagues, and if the guards in the solitary confinement wing are morally strong enough to resist the mob's bribe offers, you might live long enough to make the witness relocation program.

You'll probably have no trouble getting an apprenticeship, judging from the number of bakeries you already frequent—no doubt you can talk some fifth generation baker who's heartbroken that his son Gianni refuses to take up the family business into giving you a chance. After you listen to several hours of "You will make me proud and be my son now like he would if I had stayed in the old country" as your future employer grows drunker on the wine he keeps in the back, your apprenticeship is firmly in place.

You're ambitious, and you learn quickly. The one thing you soon realize is that if you're going to keep up the pace in his kitchen and handle the heat of the ovens, you're going to need to shed the extra 30 pounds you're carrying. Look kid, I can say that if anyone can—I'm not exactly svelte here myself. Your working hours will take a little getting used to, but after a while it seems normal to set your alarm for 3 a.m., and when you finish work before noon, you can get into the gym to burn off calories before the crowds arrive.

You alternate your time between the bakery and the community college where you're getting your "formal" training. It's there that you adopt the ancient enmity between your kind—bakers—and your hated rivals, the pastry chefs. Your jealousy and hatred is something almost innate whenever you see their smirking, superior faces—not unlike the unbridled loathing the mere optician feels for his nemesis, the optometrist.

Your life isn't all breads and pies, however, and you pine for a normal social life when your evenings end around the same time most of your friends are just heading out for a night on the town. Your sleep patterns suffer for it, but you learn to compensate for a week's worth of early morning loneliness with increasingly wild and debauched weekend adventures.

Eventually, though, you tire of mindless hedonism, and when you ask out the cute college girl who mans the bakery's counter one summer, you're happy that she accepts, and soon you're in your first serious relationship. The problem is, unlike you, she keeps normal hours, and you can't rightly expect her to stay home nights because you have to get up early. Instead, you wallow in jealously imagining her out with other guys as you knead dough alone at 4 a.m.—after all, her inhibitions only vanish late in the evening, when you're hardly ever around.

Despite your jealousy and paranoid delusions, you make it through your apprenticeship successfully, with a tentative hold on both your sanity and your romance. Your boss looks worried each morning at six a.m. as you call your girlfriend's house and hang up when she answers, but he has seen that look in your eyes, and knows better than to ask questions. He seems almost relieved when you tell him you've bought a small bakery across town and he wishes you success.

You now work alone most of the time, and you feel that as a young, enterprising businessman, you are ready to take the next step. You propose to your girlfriend, and struggle to maintain composure when she hesitates and asks for time. For the next few weeks, you're on your best behavior, and work to overcome one of the main stumbling blocks to your relationship—the low opinion her parents have of you. Their hopes for their daughter involved her marrying a doctor or a lawyer, someone able to maintain the silver spoon lifestyle to which she'd become accustomed. She'd only worked in the bakery originally to buy a better stereo for the BMW her parents gave her on her 18th birthday.

Disaster strikes one evening when her parents invite you to dinner. On the way there she warns you that she may have given them the mistaken idea that you are a pastry chef, and that they have invited her cousin Robert, which she pronounces the french way, to meet you that evening. Robert is, in fact, a real pastry chef.

You maintain a sullen silence through most of dinner. Robert more than makes up for your aloofness with his witty stories of Paris, where he is studying at a world-renowned pastry institute. His faux french accent makes your blood boil, and it's worse when he insists on referring to himself as a "patissier". Eventually you jump to your feet and hurl the invective that's built up for four years inside you, ever since the community college pastry chefs so soundly defeated the much inferior bakers' softball team, and mocked you for months about it.

Your girlfriend is weeping as she leads you outside; you almost fight past her to attack her cousin once more when you hear his parting shot about "pop tarts". She tearfully gives you back her ring, and you close the bakery and get drunk for three days.

Just when you debate terminating your pathetic life, she walks in the front door of the bakery and confesses her misery since your breakup. The two of you hop on a plane to Vegas for a quickie wedding. When you get back, she replaces the counter girl and the two of you work to make the business a success together—you don't have any choice; her parents will cut her off completely when they learn of the marriage.

It's a few months before your paranoid jealousy begins again. You shift her hours to more closely match your own—who cares that no customers want to shop at 6:00 a.m.—and you hire a part time staffer to serve the late afternoon crowd. Still, you barely avoid criminal charges when you mistakenly take a customer's offhand remark "nice buns" for a pass at your wife.

After six months the love of your life realizes her mistake, and runs off in the middle of the night—it isn't tough, after all, since you're already at work. You try desperately to find her, but all her parents will tell you is that she's gone to Europe. You hire a detective, who discovers that she went to stay with Robert, and she's taken up with one of his pastry chef friends.

It's only the conscientious work of Air France security personnel that save her life and put you behind bars until your transfer to the criminal psych ward finishes your career as a baker—at least on the outside. You do become very skilled at producing some of the finest waffles the other prisoners have ever seen; unfortunately their comments about buns do have a second meaning.

You'll go to the bartending institute and learn the difference between shaken and stirred, the recipes for a bunch of different drinks, and how to make the flaming ones without burning yourself. Then you're off to find your $12 per hour job—if you're lucky. You’ll start as the bartender at a chain restaurant, where the manager—same age as you but with a pissy attitude—rides your ass day in and day out and says that you're putting too much actual booze in the drinks—truth is, you're "comping" your buddies on staff and some of the cuter waitresses.

Eventually, you decide to leave before you say something to lose your reference, and you go to work at a nightclub. It's way more fun—energetic and social—problem is, the few cute women who chat you up at the bar end up leaving with other guys because you don't get off work until 2 a.m.—besides, it’s sad to see the same people getting hammered, week in and week out. Soon you're an invaluable resource to the players of the club—you warn them which prospects have herpes, crazy ex's or three kids. They take care of you with good tips, but you don't get enough of those, and the waitresses don't share theirs like they should.

You begin drinking after work more and more, and eventually get an impaired charge. In the court-mandated alcohol counseling you meet a girl and the two of you get serious quickly and decide to get married. Problem is—she IS an alcoholic, and your only marketable skill is pouring booze. You're out late nights, and you worry that home alone, or out with her friends, she'll start drinking again.

She does, and when she does, she starts accusing you of messing around with the girls you work with—soon you're volunteering for extra shifts and doing weddings on the side just to stay away. She eventually leaves, but then dries out and comes back and you agree to work on things. This cycle continues for the next seven years of your marriage, during which time you add two kids to the mess.

The club you work at decides to go for the "coyote ugly" girls thing, and you're unemployed. At this point, you're not really young enough to get hired on at any more dance clubs, so you go to work for a low-key, lower paying neighborhood pub. The staff is fine, there's decent food on your breaks, and you get home earlier. Of course, you see the same sad old drunks night in and night out, and the three karaoke nights per week are your own small embodiment of hell. You finally pull the pin on bartending at age 45, and work in one of those horrible moneymart places until a holdup man kills you when you're 52.

Crap—You want to be a professional ball player? I HATE baseball. Oh right, you're the kid that got kicked off the school team when your dad beat up that umpire in the exhibition game against the special needs school—Hmm—I guess I can come up with something...

You obviously won't want to waste your time playing ball for some nothing college in the middle of nowhere when you can wander from town to town trying out for semipro ball teams in the middle of nowhere. You've got a decent bat, and you can cover some ground in the outfield, so you'll get picked up on a ten day contract by some podunk town in the midwest somewhere. That's where you'll meet Sparky—the old has-been manager who claims he once worked as a base coach for the Oakland A's in the mid-70s. When your team has a layover in a town that actually has a library with internet access, you'll check out his story and confirm that he's full of crap. Still, he'll teach you some important lessons.

First he'll show you how to wear baggy shirts to increase your chance of getting hit by a pitch—then he'll teach you the art of spitting your chewing tobacco juice on rival teams' mascots. You'll be kind of sad to lose his folksy wisdom when you get picked up by a semi-respectable double-A club, but you'll also be a little relieved, since he kept offering to come to your room and give you a rubdown after games.

Your learning will continue at this new level, and you'll be introduced to the wonder of steroids. It's only natural that a league with most of its teams in farm country has access to some of the best horse hormones anywhere. Soon you're bulking up, and you find yourself enjoying a little alfalfa each morning on your wheaties.

At 21, you're offered a contract by a major league team, and they send you to their Triple-A affiliate. It's a better class of hotel and bus; and sometimes you even fly to road games. Here they really prepare you for the big games—they warn you that the league is serious about cracking down on steroids and illegal bats, and then their trainers show you a new, undetectable hormone that can only be extracted from the pituitary gland of adolescent males. It's only on a dark layover in Topeka that you find out that the adolescent males are south american street kids who are killed to provide you with your extra hitting boost. Out of guilt, you start secretly dedicating your home runs to their memory.

You also take advantage of the next generation of corked bats, which have a special transmitter inside that broadcasts a fake image of wood to throw off X-ray machines.

Fortunately, by this time, you are aware that the secret signs of the base coaches have nothing to do with the game, and everything to do with relaying information about secret hormone shipments between teams. You signal back your problem, and within ten days, a replacement jaw is shipped to you in an unmarked cooler—it's almost the same size as yours and after the surgery you hit 20 home runs that season that you dedicate to the memory of "Guillermo".

First of all, you'll need to go get the certificates and licenses you need—air brakes and more—so you'll probably end up driving truck for a year or two before you get hired by a limousine service. That gig will put you in a wide variety of vehicles, including the stretch limo, and its uglier cousin, the stretch SUV, where every grad ceremony or 16th birthday provides you once again with a reminder that human vomit has a stench that is hard to get out of upholstery. You also learn that while the limo company might want to have you keep an eye on the antics of your young charges, glancing at the monitor (the privacy window only blocks your rear view mirror—little do they know that closing it activates a hidden camera back in the passenger area) destroys a little piece of your soul each time you look.

You'll have to take some of those unwieldy machines home for the night after some of your jobs; everyone in your neighborhood will soon hate you for the times you block their driveways or your wide turns chew up their front lawns. Worse even than the pimp service you provide libidinous adolescents is the personal chauffeur duty you sometimes are assigned for various low level celebrities and music stars who inevitably make you wait for them for hours outside some trendy underground nightclub which also happens to be in the worse neighborhood in town—areas where the locals believe that the dude in the uniform in the big limo has to be worth mugging.

Eventually you pull the airport limo gig, and there you learn the truly cutthroat nature of your colleagues driving cabs and other minibuses. You also learn the hard way that the "generous" tips you receive from a variety of foreigners translate to pennies in real money when you visit the currency exchange.

After that, you'll think you've found a better job when you score the local seniors' shuttle—a bus shared by a variety of care homes to ferry their nearly-deads to all manner of painfully dull entertainment. At the end you can nearly always look forward yet another trip to the local IHOP where you learn to despise all manner of waffles and crepes. Still, there's always that box of stale chocolates to look forward to each Christmas.

Finally you manage to break into the city bus line. It's union wages and an easily-memorizable route for you. Unfortunately, as junior man, you'll get the midnight ghetto run, and likely you'll be on anxiety meds within six months, and on stress leave within a year. Of course, maybe it won't bother you—at least that way you'll be happy until the end sneaks up on you at the business end of .45.

Oh hello. No, he's not here right now, but I'm substituting for him. I'm Ms. Pauly, but you can call me by my first name, Anna. So, I understand that normally this is the office where people come to get advice on what to do for a living. What would you... Oh, a taxi driver? How wonderful! Let me see, I think I can come up with something for you.

You look like the type of person who's a really careful driver—am I right? Oh, really? Well, I'm sure it was a misunderstanding and you'll get your license back very soon.

So, once you do, and you walk out of here with your diploma, you will have to take some important defensive driving courses, so you know the best way to handle the roads, to protect the precious lives entrusted to you each day.

Taxi driving will be an exciting life, so you should go downtown now, while you're still in high school, and make friends with the drivers who are waiting for fares down there. Tell them your dreams; I'm sure they'll be just as excited as you are. You'll see the romantic side of life when you're cab driving—important politicians, successful business people, and young newlyweds all will graceyour clean, shiny taxicab, made all that sweeter by the fresh cut flowers you place each day in the little holder on the dashboard.

Whatever—don't roll your eyes at me, you psychotic Mary Kay reject. Ugh—-look kid, I'm sick as a dog and I've been drinking since noon, but I came here to pick up the bottle I left... er, some important papers, and I heard that load of crap. I don't have much time... I'll give it to you simple:

You'll hate driving cab, you'll hate the people who ride it—they'll either look down on you or they'll puke in your car. Nobody will tip you enough, and everybody will think you're trying to rip them off. You'll be robbed an average of once every 10 weeks. People will run off without paying about four times a week. You'll get fat, and you won't get dates. You won't be able to afford a nice place, so you'll live over the taxistand. On your days off you'll eventually start working the dispatch, since that's where they deal the drugs from, so at least you can finally make a little bit of money.

You'll have to find some sort of town where tacky tourists go--make sure it has places where you'll see Texans in flowered shirts and such. Avoid Mexican and most Carribean resorts where the local kids will be pestering you all the time, plus it's too hot for the tourists to sit still for the entire 90 seconds it takes you to draw them. You might think somewhere like Paris is too upscale for this kind of work, but you're not trying to appeal to the locals; your clientele are the same people who think by yelling at foreigners or speaking in a fake accent that they'll somehow be more easily understood.

The trick will be to find somewhere you don't have to pay outlandish busker/artist fees just for the privilege of working. That's why I suspect most regular tourist traps like the Santa Monica Pier won't work--but if you hang around near the sketchy sellers of fake rolexs in places like Battery Park in Manhattan, you're probably safe from too much harassment.

It won't be too challenging to learn the craft--first of all, almost every annoying tourist type who's paid for one of these sketches then comes home and uploads it to their internet holiday albums, so you can see plenty of samples to get the basic idea. If you need to, wander down to where any local caricature artist is working; treat them like they actually have some talent and they'll be glad to show you what they do--it's not like it ever happens to them.

You'll set up shop in some tourist town, and it won't take long until you learn the fundamental problem with your career--it's seasonal. In most places, you've got maybe a four-month window to ply your trade. You could try to move to other places to catch their tourist seasons, but you don't make enough to pay high-season rent in any of these locales.

Fortunately, after about four or five years of struggling through off-seasons doing horrible menial jobs you'll pray to forget, you'll sketch another typical rich tourist kid holidaying with her friends on daddy's credit card, but this one will be different. She's almost the same age as you, and while not exactly a looker, there's some little bit of chemistry there--though maybe it's just when she offers to buy you lunch you realize you won't have to make the difficult choice between sustenance and the two packs a day you smoke to get you through the boredom of the down time between customers.

You have a whirlwind romance, and soon you're engaged. Her parents fly you up to their estate to check you out, and it's clear they don't approve--but the suitors have been rare up to this point, so they feign a shallow cordiality that does little to mask their true hostility.

Her father is that type of eccentric that would be labeled crazy if he didn't have money, and your hope of wedded bliss comes crashing down when you sketch him one day. Seems he had a hydrocephalic twin who died shortly after birth and the gigantic head on your caricature convinces him you knew of the family's tragic secret and this is your way of mocking him and his pain. He orders you out of the house and forbids his daughter to see you again.

You exchange emails with her for a few weeks, but it's clear she's not willing to sacrifice her lifestyle to be with you. You go back to your spot on the tourist stroll, but in your absence, a new couple has shown up--she does sketches wearing little more than a bikini at one end of the boardwalk, while her good looking tattoed boyfriend does his at the other. They charge twice what you did and still have lineups of eager customers. You simply cannot compete.

You move back here, to your hometown, where you first try your hand at editorial cartooning. Unfortunately, while other kids were learning about politics and current events, you were skipping class, creating your graffiti masterpieces, and you simply are too ill-informed for your art work to grace the third page of the local newspaper.

Then you go to the local "party time entertainers" office. You think you're offering them something novel, but the owner's eyes just glaze over when you show him your samples of girls riding unicorns and boys in superhero capes. Still, he adds you to his stable of employees, and you go out to various birthday parties, as well as the occasional bat or bar mitzvah.

Your self-esteem is dashed when you realize most kids are disappointed when you arrive--you're a couple rungs of the entertainment ladder below both the clown and the birthday magician. Even the annoying "craft lady" who forces kids to glue stars to clay plant pots is better received than you are.

Desperate, you finally escape the humiliation of your home town--most of your classmates have been getting degrees and building successful careers while you've wasted the post-high school years trying to find some way to live off your modicum of drawing skill. You're lucky enough to score a job doing caricatures on a cruise ship.

You're so happy to get the gig you find out too late it's a non-smoking ship, so you spend half your earnings bribing the crew to let you sneak cigarettes in the boiler room. You're making next to nothing, and your accommodations are terrible--you share a small stateroom with three dishwashers who speak little English and who spend all their free time playing some card game you don't fully comprehend, although they teach you enough one night to take most of your small stash of cash you've managed to squirrel away during the voyage.

Just before the trip ends, a rather mysterious asian man approaches you and hands you his business card, with a Hong Kong number and address. He tells you he has work for someone with your talents. You are desperate for any thread of hope so you don't check it out; you just dump your remaing cash on the counter of a discount travel agent and get a one-way ticket to chase yet another dream.

He explains that there is a market that his company meets that isn't entirely legal. He explains that in Asia there simply isn't enough of certain kinds of merchandise to meet demands, so that's where creative entrepreneurs step in.

Next thing you know, you're in a tiny, humid room in some southeast asian country with a government corrupt enough to look the other way while you and your other underpaid colleagues churn out the art work that is printed on all manner of counterfeit Disney merchandise--from t-shirts to training potties.

While your new country might be willing to accept bribe money from your employer to ignore the copyright treaties they've signed, they're also willing to take cash to look the other way when Disney's secret mercenary death squad shows up to wipe your little operation out. You and your colleagues are buried in a mass, unmarked grave, but somehow your passport surfaces a few months later, along with a story that you were killed in a drug deal gone wrong.

Hi kid—what's your interest today? "Civic official?" Oh yeah, I saw that guy at the press conference explaining why the mayor wasn't really drunk at the boat show last weekend. I suppose, if that looks like a good way to spend your life, I could give you some ideas...

There's a fundamental flaw with municipal politics—or with most politics, really. You see, the people need a mayor to be someone who can understand the finer points of political discourse, study issues and look for resolutions, and pay attention to the minute details of governmental policy. Problem is, the characteristics that get you elected—charisma, broad appeal, making issues simplistic and polarized—are all antithetical to those characteristics that will make a good mayor.

That's where you will come in. You will be the one who does the boring background work on every issue. If there's a controversy about a new housing development being built in a sensitive environmental area, you get to poll all the eco-freaks about their concerns. If the city sees the potential financial windfall from a legalized prostitution district, you're the guy who will have to sit down with the local priest and be harangued about your filthy lack of morals.

You will become a familiar fixture at the city archives, and your intimate knowledge of so many previous political decisions and all of the implications of any future legislation make you the mayor's first choice when he or she needs to be advised on what position to adopt. If you give wise counsel, the mayor will claim all credit and you will languish in the shadows. If you make a mistake, you will be sacrificed to the media, pilloried for your stupidity while the mayor disavows you repeatedly.

The mayor gets to attend all the galas and soirees, while you bring home stacks of briefs and position papers each night to further wedge distance between you and your longsuffering family—oh, didn't I mention you'll get married young? You'll do so shrewdly, binding yourself to the unattractive but well-connected daughter of a long-time political bagman.

Eventually your frustration with the stupidity of the elected officials around you leads to one of the three solaces of the smart but disillusioned civic official: drink, adultery or corruption. No matter which you choose, it will be a further descent into the loneliness that makes you daily question the worth of your existence. And when you are finally fired, whether for drunken incompetence, inappropriate office romance, or reckless embezzlement, you will silently rejoice that your career has ended.

What's that? You want to be a clown? The circus kind or... Oh, the kids' party kind. Yeah, I know a little bit about that. My ex-wife's lawyer thought it was relevant that the guy I hired for our son's birthday had just been released from... Nevermind, let me tell you what's ahead.

First of all, there's really not one particular place to get trained for all this—despite the "Clown College" you heard about on The Simpsons, the best way to go about learning it is to work as gofer and general slave for someone already doing it successfully. You'll need a catchy name—looking at you I'd guess Roly Poly might fit—and try to avoid overdoing the whole hair/makeup thing. What most people doing the clown shtick don't realize is that most kids are terrified of clowns.

Once you've learned to pull off the basic balloon animals and a few simple card tricks, you're ready to leave your mentor and start your act. You'll need a prop tricycle, a lot of annoying noisemakers, and the basic clown suit. You'll buy a crap van that spews blue smoke and you'll get one of those sad magnetic business signs to stick on the side—too bad there won't be enough real metal left on your van to stick it on properly.

You figure out that the only way you'll break into the cutthroat world of party clowning is to undercut your competition. You charge about 2/3 of what your previous boss did, but that just gets you the really cheap, unpleasant customers who deduct that one piece of cake you ate from your pay. You aren't really making enough money to survive on, so plan B saves you. You carefully orchestrate a variety of rumors about the main competition in town—your whisper campaign hints of drug use, child abuse and more. You couple this with some radio ads—you clean out your savings to pay for them—emphasizing your identity as the "safe" entertainer for children.

Eventually all birthdays, bar mitzvahs and kindergarten graduations begin to look the same. There’ll always be one or two kids who try to pull off your fake nose, and you see more kids vomit from overindulging on party food than you can count.

You get married—fortunately your wife will have a real job; unfortunately she will resent your pathetic income once the novelty of being "Mrs. Poly" wears off. You'll struggle to find clown work during the winter, and be forced into a variety of unsatisfying, low-paying jobs—all you're suited for due to your lack of a real education.

You'll come home beat and your wife will berate you for not being a more involved parent. "You go make everyone else's kids laugh—try it with your own" she'll scream. Of course, your children have long since seen and heard everything you have to offer, and by the time they're 12, you're simply a source of extreme embarrassment that only raiding their mother's prescription bottles can alleviate.

By the time you're 45, you'll have to go back to school to learn some sort of useful skill that might earn you a few dollars above minimum wage. Of course, since you wasted half your life trying the futile clown business, you'll then have to work until you're 75 before you can ever hope to retire.

Hey kid—interesting shirt. What kind of t-shirt is that? Bangladeshi Death Ska? Right—Yeah, you probably are the only kid who's cool enough to know their music. So you want to be a music... Oh—comic book store, huh? Right, I know NOT like that guy on The Simpsons; I think it might be interesting...

You're someone who is going to have to overcome one of the most challenging handicaps when it comes to starting a business—your overall disdain for the human race. You've always been that trendy hipster who takes unhealthy obsessive pride that the music, movies, literature, and—dare I say, comics—that you like are a sign of your superiority. Yeah, right—anime is literature. Podiatrists are doctors, too.

Your problem is your love for the esoteric, and your smugness about it. You'll need to actually be nice to the people you approach to help finance your comic store, but your overbearing nature will make it difficult for you to avoid offending them. (I remember the time you threw your drink on that girl who asked you to dance just because she was wearing a "Samurai Pizza Cats" t-shirt.)

Eventually, though, you'll manage to get a lease on a small, mildewed store located in a bad part of downtown. You'll beg and borrow from everyone you know and slide into further debt to stock the store. As much as you hate it, you'll stock the "popular" comics—anime series you spent most of your high school years sneering at. You'll bite your tongue every time some fanboy or fangirl comes in to purchase the over-hyped crap that is your store's only chance of survival. Meanwhile, your own favorite series—an obscure comic written in an odd dialect by a former Shinto priest who lives on a tiny Japanese island—languishes untouched on its huge display in the center of your shop.

You become even more frustrated when your taste in J-pop is completely rejected by your customers as well. You end up selling off the cds to giggling Japanese tourists for a quarter of their original worth. The tourists smile at your taste in music, and look almost disturbed at the odd flotsam of their culture that fills your store.

Meanwhile, you descend further into misanthropy; even your parents find it difficult to stomach your company more than a few times a year. You are so wrapped up in your fascination with your own passions that you know nothing of politics, hit tv shows or any of the other interests of the common man. Your consciousness is completely dominated by your particular anime obsession—the story of a gentle but wise clam who has the magical ability to shift into another dimension where he solves domestic disputes by telling traditional Shinto parables.

You stave off bankruptcy by tapping into the lucrative social misfit market—you begin staging and supplying various animecon and comic expo events. Although the anime community flocks to your store to outfit themselves for these events, you still creep them out. Your pathetic attempts to "chill" with some kids in their ersatz Cardcaptor costumes just results in derision: "What's with the creepy guy in the clam suit?"

Still, their money is good, and eventually you save up enough to realize your dream—you fly to Japan and go to the island where your hero still lives. You get off the boat and make the long trek up to his simple home—the place where he drew the clam stories that fill your consciousness. He is surprised to see you, but then seems almost a bit frightened when he realizes you are the same person who has been sending him letters on an almost daily basis for the last eight years. Still, over a cup of tea he relaxes, and begins dispensing his wisdom.

Eventually, though, you can't take it. You really had no idea what you would hear from him, but you certainly had not expected him to essentially tell you to "get a life". You begin weeping and run to some cliffs and consider throwing yourself into the sea. The old man follows you and tries to convince you your life is worth living, but he simply angers you more and you push him over the cliff instead.

What? A concierge? I imagine you'd have to do some sort of training for that job. Back in the old days, when the school used to do those "slave day" fundraiser things, then you could get an idea... sorry, I get nostalgic sometimes for the way school used to be. Back when you could have slave days and smoke in staff rooms and....right. A concierge.

You'll probably take some sort of hospitality management course but really, on the job is where your training will happen. You will likely have to do the bellhop gig--back in the day we called them bellboys, and by the way, what the hell is a "fisher"? Oh, right. So you'll do the bellhop thing and carry bags, maybe drive the "limo"--glorified short bus if you ask me--to the airport to pick up tourists, but then, if you're lucky, you can maybe work your way up to the night gig as a concierge.

It's kind of like being a personal assistant, but you don't just have to cater to the whims of one selfish idiot--you're supposed to make everyone happy. It's also kind of like being a pimp, but instead of selling your girls, you're pimpin' the entire city. At least there are some perks that make it worth your while.

That's the glory of this job--you get to eat at the best restaurants and drink in the best lounges for free. Feel like taking in a theatre show? On the house. Of course, there is a price--you have to shill for them when some tourist wants an idea for dinner or entertainment. Unfortunately, it isn't just you who gets comped by these businesses--all of your bosses and managers also get freebies in return for ordering you to promote their friends' places.

You'll become the master of the "let me call and make a reservation for you" method of ensuring your kickbacks. You'll have to be smooth, though--it's expected that every concierge is never flustered by anything anyone requests, no matter how depraved or ridiculous. The customer is always right--as are the 40 members of the hotel staff above you in the pecking order--each of whom feel it is their right to order you to attend to their whims on a moment's notice.

You won't have to stay a concierge--you could always move to desk clerk or shift manager--maybe get into the catering department. You won't, though--you like the tips you receive out front, dealing with the baser needs of the public. You also generously offer to stay on the night shift. It's simple--the darkness brings out the darker side of human nature, and guests tip more for those who don't show their disgust.

Your end will come unexpectedly--either you'll be caught in a lie to the wrong psycho husband about his wife's weekly trysts with her lover, or the government will catch up with all the years of underdeclared gratuity income you can never manage to pay back taxes on.

Hey kid--you're lookin' a little tired. Close up the pizza place again last night? That sucks. Yeah--I do hear you're pretty good at it. Still, there's a difference between a high school job for gas money, and a life sentence.

You'll stick at the pizza place--or go to another similar dive--once you're finished here. Once you no longer have to go to school, you can take the day shifts that keep your evenings free. Of course, you understand by "day shift" they mean 11:00 a.m. 'til whenever the hell the tyrannical manager tells you you're free to drag your grease-coated carcass home. Most likely it will be just after the girl you promised to see has given up and gone out dancing with some other guy.

You'll work hard--it's hot, constant labor--and you hate the fact that when your food is quick and well-prepared, the waiters get the tips, but when something screws up, you're the one who wears it. Like all cooks, you become master of the "hidden lugee"--that blob of saliva and phlegm that hides so well in most cream sauces. It's only for the truly difficult customers, of course. Unfortunately for your restaurant's clientele, as you become increasingly bitter, more and more customers bear the brunt of your frustration, even if they are unaware of the bonus DNA you include with the daily special.

You decide to take some college courses--your grades here are pathetic due to the brutal work schedule you already keep, so you'll only be able to get into those overpriced private business and computer colleges--don't be surprised when you're the only one in the class who actually has a good command of the English language.

The "diploma" they give you doesn't make anyone more convinced you'd make a good restaurant manager, so you quit your job and go to work on a cruise ship. It's a big change--when they're in the U.S. or Canada, there is a qualified, conscientious kitchen staff working in completely hygienic surroundings--once they get your first foreign port, however, the "show staff" hops a plane to another ship that might be subject to inspection back home, while you find yourself surrounded by a motley collection of dubiously-qualified refugees from a variety of nations.

You soon tire of the constant pressure of your day--unlike the greasy dives you worked before, the clientele of the cruise ship is used to haute cuisine and won't hesitate to complain if they feel your pretentious preparations aren't up to their standards.

Meanwhile, you learn to look the other way as the staff around you neglects the basic practices of safe food handling and personal hygiene. It is only a matter of time before another one of those "mysterious" outbreaks of disease spreads through the cruise ship population like wildfire, and unlike the baffled passengers and media, you are fully aware of the source of the intestinal plague.

The virus forces the ship back to port where a number of passengers are sent to hospital, and you resign your post as soon as the three-day quarantine is lifted. You head back here, to your hometown, and empty your bank account to make a down payment on a hot dog stand. The annual permit costs twice what the stand is worth, but you figure it's mindless, simple work compared to your other cooking jobs, and soon you're pulling in a sizeable weekly income.

Unfortunately, your lungs were damaged by the cruise ship virus, and the constant exposure to damp, exhaust-filled downtown air gives you a nagging cough that eventually develops into pneumonia. When you are released from the hospital, you sell the cart and go looking for a cooking job that includes health and prescription coverage.

Such jobs, for those without actual chef's papers, are few and far between. You are offered a job at the hospital, but you know enough about the "superbugs" that strike every year or so in the wards which house the most weakened to turn that opportunity down. Then, you receive another offer--you are recruited to cook for the state prison down the highway.

It's a job that includes full benefits, and you work relatively normal hours and even get decent holiday breaks. You begin relaxing into the job after a few months, and aside from the sometimes awkward interactions you have with the few inmates assigned to kitchen duty, you rarely come into contact with any of the prisoners.

Then, in a bid to save money, the government contracts out the food service operation of the prison. You fear you will lose your benefits and see your pay cut in half, but fortunately your union negotiates a deal that grandfathers your old wages and benefits into your new contract--it's only the newly hired staff who will be paid poorly and denied the benefit package.

The new regime cuts corners wherever possible, and their first act is to impose a new set of rules regarding food purchase. Soon the prisoners become agitated as the quality of their meals begins to suffer from the shoddy meat and overripe vegetables you are forced use in all your recipes. Some of the prisoners who work with you begin passing along death threats from the angry cons.

The riot is unexpected, and it takes place when liver is substituted for a planned sparerib dinner. The prisoners take you hostage, along with two guards, but when the swat team storms the building, it is only you who are found dead--a sprig of parsley covering each eye.

Hi—good to see you—don't mind the mess, let me move that... this office is so small; here, let me open a window, it's kind of stale in here...I shouldn't have had chili for lunch, if you know...oh, okay. So you wanna be what? A corporate lawyer—really? A pretty girl like you? You could be like a model or something... okay. You want to move back to Canada? Our loss, I guess. Here goes:

You'll do an undergraduate degree in Political Science, or Economics—actually, you look like an honors English girl—maybe with a minor in the classics. Your profs—the ones who aren't gay—will hit on you, and you'll get good grades because you're smart and you don't mind who knows it. You'll write the LSAT in 3rd year, but your boyfriend will have broken up with you the night before and you'll bomb—so you'll pay to do it again later. This time you'll do well, and combined with your grades and some killer references from your profs, you'll be offered a chance to go to some of the top law schools in the country. Eventually you choose Queens—it's in Ontario, and that's where you want to eventually practice.

You have no life in law school, and when you do have any spare time you have to do volunteer work at a legal aid clinic telling drunks how to get off impaired charges and worse—you hate them all, and discover the hard way that you need to get an unlisted phone number. Eventually the hellish grind pays off and you're offered a position articling at a top Bay Street firm. You get invited to more lunches with partners than most articling students, but you convince yourself it's not because of how you look. One balding, paunchy would-be Romeo after another invites you along to weekend legal conferences, or to go interview witnesses with him in Atlanta or Miami. Eventually, after tiring of fending off the advances of these creeps who think their money and power make them desirable, you quite accepting trips and start coming in early to avoid running into them.

The stress of the job, the pace and the harassment begins to take their toll. You develop a variety of minor ailments, and start taking diet pills to keep yourself alert. Eventually you finish the year and are offered an entry position at the firm. You take it. Your fellow articling students are convinced you slept your way into the position, and don't make a secret of it.

Three years later you marry a guy who works as a graphic designer—you tell yourself you don't care if he earns 1/3 of what you do. Two years later, just as you're about to be offered an associate's position, you get pregnant. Artist boy is just "breaking through" to a new level with his career, so you agree to take maternity leave. It destroys your chance of a promotion—your staff begin calling you "mommy", other lawyers' eyes glaze over when you talk about your kid and show them baby pictures and you can't find a good babysitter for the times you have to work late to rebuild your career...

Your husband resents the time you're devoting to work and starts teaching an evening art class where he meets a 19 year old who dotes on his every word... In divorce court the colleague you trusted to protect your interests blows it, reminding you on the way out of the court you once turned down his offer of a weekend conference—the result is that half your income is going to your deadbeat ex husband, who gets primary custody of your child because you are "excessively devoted to your job".

You begin having anxiety attacks and one day one of the partners finds you in a break room weeping... They send you to a shrink the company has on retainer, and quietly arrange to have you transferred to Calgary, where you finish your career representing various cattlemen and land developers in their petty battles over property rights that involve the smell of manure devaluing prime real estate developments. Your child thinks you cold and unfeeling, but manages to call you everytime a cash handout is needed. You never remarry, but drift through a series of unsatisfying relationships.

I assume you hang around museums now, so that's a good start. Get used to that stale, humidity-controlled air where the clatter of heels on marble is the only sound louder than hushed whispers. You're not going to have to worry much about sunscreen for the next few decades.

You'll do an undergraduate degree in something like the classics--relevant to museum work but not likely to help you in most other careers. You'd better do the honors program and get good marks, since you want to break into a very small niche career market, and they can afford to be picky.

You'll look to go to a more prestigious university for your graduate work; be prepared to brown nose for all you're worth to get good recommendations from your undergraduate professors, and hope for some sort of work study fellowship or something to make your grad school less financially back-breaking.

I'm glossing over this, but we're now about seven years into your academic game plan. By this time you've already lost a half-dozen relationships because girls might be impressed by authentic tour jackets, but they don't want to live in a one-room sub-cellar until they're 35.

That will be heaven for you--you get to be behind the scenes, seeing the new acquisitions before the maddening crowd even has an inkling they're there. You won't mind the ridiculous hours and the constant lung problems from breathing 500 year old mould--it's all worth it to be part of the excitement--well, maybe excitement isn't the word most normal people would use, but you get the idea--part of the inner circle of geeks who think museums are cooler than say, eating, drinking and having normal human interactions.

Eventually you'll graduate, and toil thanklessly in some underpaid staff position in the same museum where you did your advanced degree studies. In the few moments of free time you have, you put out feelers to most major museums in the world, and after a few years of soul-crushing drudgery, you finally get the call you've dreamed of--a museum in a decent-sized midwestern city, and you're actually surprised you made the cut.

Once you get there, though, you understand the situation a bit better. Seems that while the museum had a pretty decent reputation during the 70s and 80s, it's been the site of bitter infighting between museum administration and the board of directors for over a decade. Your predecessor was just another casualty in that ongoing war, and most give you a shelf life of less than a year.

The flip side, though, is that the tension of being a spineless lackey with the board makes you an unbearable tyrant to your underlings. Still, you bring a sense of order to the building that is most welcome that after the chaos of the previous regimes.

You begin working to get more prestigious exhibits to visit your museum, and the resulting publicity helps bring in more donations--including new, generous corporate sponsors who want to be associated with the positive energy so in contrast with the museum's previously stagnant atmosphere.

For the first time in your life you have a decent income, and you are able to put a down payment on a nice condo in a trendy part of downtown that is only a few blocks from where you work. The only problem is that the convenience makes it easier for you to spend all your waking hours in the museum, but you don't really mind that much.

After a while you realize the extent of the problems you've inherited. While corporations are eager to sponsor popular exhibits, basic building maintenance isn't so sexy, and you are constantly given new examples of how decrepit the building is. First it's termites in the Mayan exhibit,then it's the toxic black mould that accompanied a Mongolian warrior's tomb artifacts and which has spread throughout the entire Asian wing.

You also are unable to relax whenever the public comes into the museum--imagine your tour jacket anxiety and multiply it by a million. You flinch every time you see a camera flash go off, and make a point of berating offending visitors. You cringe every time a school group come in, knowing that "Do Not Touch" signs have little power when it comes to kids who spent the bus ride to the museum washing down candy with quart-sized carbonated caffeine infusions.

Your staff is coldly polite to you, but you eventually find a website that feature videos secretly taped of you haranguing Asian schoolgirls who dared snap photos in the Egyptian room. You despise the seniors who man the volunteer posts to lecture class groups and give directions--it's not that their unpaid work isn't valuable, you just tire of the constant bleating about how it used to be under previous curators.

Your museum, like all such mid-level establishments, has an eclectic mix of exhibits. Ultimately, your budget doesn't allow you to send out teams or compete with facilities like the Met or the British Museum, so you rely on a combination of larger museum's leftovers and the goodwill of local benefactors who provide some of the more interesting artifacts.

One coup during your tenure is the acquisition of a collection of Yoruba artifacts obtained, as always, through questionable means. Some corrupt Nigerian officials--not of Yoruba ancestry--sold them to your benefactor and he sets up a press conference to bask in the acclaim given his largesse. You are merely a prop in his campaign of self-promotion.

Unfortunately, not everyone understand that--especially the Yoruba. They begin agitating for the return of the precious artifacts and they target you with a letter writing campaign, which soon escalates to a media war featuring a daily gauntlet of placard-waving protesters who hurl imprecations at you every day when you try to sneak into work.

Your demise, though, will be labeled an "accident". You come to work one morning to find the alarm ringing and the front door wide open. It seems that one of the security guards was a Yoruban plant and he's let in a group to liberate and deface the hated display.

You try to chase them out, but in the confusion, the statue of Yemoja falls on you, knocking you into a coma from which you awaken six months later, able to only remember your locker combination from junior high. The museum's board spearheads a charity campaign to raise funds for you, and they convert a small room in the museum basement into a simple apartment where you can live peacefully in the only place you were ever happy.

You're the princess, right? Only child—or only daughter. There are photo albums full of you in little pink party dresses—applause foreverything you ever did. You so wanted to be a dancer, so your parents put you in, even though most of the girls were a little older than you.

You loved it—instantly. You loved the grace, the moves, the costumes, the music—you didn't even mind it when Olga snapped at you—called you a graceless cow, and said you were pathetic—what does a 7 year old know?

Time passed, and you got better—but so did the competition. You weren't expecting the backbiting and gossip to be so vicious—girls from better neighborhoods mocking your family station wagon, and wondering why you weren't going to the dance camp in France with the others.... Soon you noticed that the mean girls with the money were getting the best solos, the most time in front of the audience, yet you knew you were as good if not better than they were—but your dad didn't own a business that gave the dance company thousands of dollars worth of donations each year.

Fast forward a few years—you're one of the unlucky ones—puberty comes a little early to you, and you're carrying a little more weight—perfectly healthy, normal weight anywhere else—but it isn't good in a dance company. You probably grew a little taller than the other girls too—what are you now—five-nine? No matter, you were determined not to let it get in your way—no Olga's, or any of the other sadistic eastern european teachers who belittled your weight, your form, and your family's "dedication"—meaning you couldn't afford the extra classes and the summer camps—none of that was going to stop you, was it?

You'll keep on dancing for another year, two tops, and then you'll attempt suicide after you don't make the company—you just don't have the body for it, even though everyone outside of dance tells you that you look great, but maybe a little thin. You go through a series of prescribed antidepressants with varying degrees of success—you even try yoga, meditation, tai chi—but you're still laying awake at night hearing Olga call you a cow, over and over. Eventually you get healthy enough to go to night school to finish your high school equivalency, and you decide that if ballet wasn't for you, maybe you can still make a living with dance. You go audition for shows with cruise lines, kids travelling story theatres, and more—but you just never really developed much stage presence in all those years of prancing about on your toes and listening to abuse—you've hidden your pain and emotion for so long now you need to show them you can't.

Eventually you head to Las Vegas—you've got the looks to be a showgirl, and you tell yourself that topless doesn't cheapen you—it's just french beach attire, but somehow a bit more of your already limited self-respect is destroyed. You never quite have what it takes to make it as a front line dancer there, and varying diets and plastic surgeries just distract you from the dead end your career is heading towards. You finally wake up one day and realize that you haven't danced on a stage without a pole for three years, and the offer from "executive escorts" is beginning to sound like a viable option...

You snap out of it, pack up, and head for home. You're done with letting other people judge you, and you're going to take control of your life, and start with a symbolic action—you head back to your dance company—you're going to give Olga a piece of your mind for the hell she put you through. Problem is, you're a month too late—Olga's dead, but the company manager remembers you, and ends up offering you a teaching job—you'll work with the novice ballerinas group. You're thrilled—you can help end the cycle of self loathing among young dancers...

Unfortunately, your programming goes deeper than you ever realized—who is that chubby girl in the back row? Doesn't she realize that her thumping about on stage is distracting the real talents in the group? What are her parents thinking? She should be in Irish dancing—they like a heavy step. You find yourself singling the girl out for criticism, along with others like her, and you sleep fine at night.

You'll go to college for four years to get your degree in Early Childhood Education—even though you might not want to teach preschool, you'll need the qualification anyway. It won't really be that demanding—it's one of the few university degrees where finger painting isn't just a metaphor, but actually on your transcript.

Your dating life will suck. As the junior person, you get the early 6 a.m. start that nobody else wants, which means you don't have many late nights, and when you do go out and meet guys, they're turned off by your job. Face it, guys in their early 20s don't want to think about kids and they assume since kids are your chosen career you're just itching to start a big family. Plus, when some jock tells you how he broke his ankle hang-gliding, he doesn't want to hear the patronizing first person plural comfort ("we got a boo-boo on our ankie") that you offer instinctively.

You barely eke out a living, and it irks you that a kindergarten teacher with similar years of college training earns twice what you do and has full benefits. Fortunately, your employer likes you and offers you the chance to buy into the day care, so as part owner you can begin to improve your financial picture. Unfortunately, you aren't aware that your afternoon relief, her son, has an inappropriate interest in some of the young clients of the daycare and when the lawsuit and criminal investigations happen, you escape charges, but your personal share of the liability cost, as one of the owners, forces you into bankruptcy.

You try to rebuild your career, but your lack of references—you worked the last four years for a daycare that is infamous due to the publicity around the scandal, and you have a bankruptcy that makes people wary as well—simply make it impossible for you to be hired by any daycare in the area. Finally, you turn to one of those job placement services for the truly desperate, and they place you as an au pair with a wealthy family in another city.

Unlike most other live-in nannies, you are not looking for a way to get around immigration restrictions, but you suffer the indignity of a pathetic wage just the same. You realize how your employers view you when they keep forgetting and slipping into spanish to give you instructions. The wife insists you do all manner of menial labor that means you have little or no free time for yourself, and when she's not around to nag you about dusting, the husband is creeping you out with his inappropriate advances.

Eventually he goes one step beyond what even your virtually nonexistent self-esteem will tolerate and you quit. You go to the same lawyer that handled the class action suit against your former daycare, but before you get to trial, you are shown a video of the rich couple's maid explaining tearfully how she caught you stealing from them and you threatened to kill her if she exposed you. You remember that she had been a successful actress in her home country before the revolution and it comes in handy when she sobs her suspicions that you have a serious drug problem.

Your lawyer advises you to take the offered settlement and forget about court. It isn't what you deserve, but it's enough for you to make a down payment on a big old house in a bad neighborhood, where you open a group home for foster kids. A steady stream of deeply troubled kids move through the home, and you will quickly spend a fortune on padlocks and smoke detectors.

One of these troubled teens will be responsible for your untimely death—either the abuse victim whose anger at authority finally gets out of control, or pyromaniac who found where you hide the matches. Either way, your next of kin will hear the words "beyond recognition" uttered at your inquest.

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Advertising Copywriter	Dental Assistant	Magazine Editor	Prospector
Aircraft Mechanic	Doctor	Marine Biologist	Quantity Surveyor
Antique Dealer	Dog Walker	Medical Lab Technician	Radio
Archaeologist	Elementary School Playground Supervisor	Medium	Real Estate Agent
Architect	English Professor	Microsoft Certified IT Professional	Recording Studio Technician
Art Critic	Farmer	Modeling Agent	Restaurant Critic
Auto Body Repair	Fashion Designer	Mortician	Roofer
Baker	Fast Food Manager	Movie Makeup Artist	Sports Announcer
Bartender	Financial Planner	Newscaster	Spy
Professional Baseball Player	Gangsta Rapper	Nun	Talent Agent
Bus Driver	Gardener	Paramedic	Taxidermist
Cab Driver	Glass Repair	Peace Activist	Teen Pop Singing Sensation
Caricature Portrait Artist	Gynecologist	Personal Assistant	Telemarketer
Civic Official	Hair Stylist	Personal Shopper	Therapist
Clown	Herbalist	Personal Trainer	Tourist Trap Operator
Comic Book Store Owner	High School Teacher	Pest Control Technician	Tour Guide
Concierge	International English Teacher	Pharmacist	Used Car Salesperson
Cook	Investigative Reporter	Photographer	Vintner
Corporate Lawyer	Journalism Teacher	Plumber	Wedding Planner
Curator	Lawn Maintenance	Police	Writer
Dancer	Librarian	Political Commentator
Daycare	Longshoreman	Politician