The Cynical Career Counsellor Explains Your Future as a

Marine Biologist

Oh, hi there--back from that job shadow thing at Sealand? Yeah, when I heard you were coming I got these brochures for you. You must've learned a lot about looking after those Orcas or whatever they're called--how come their fins get all bendy in those aquarium places anyway? You all good, then--I mean, you learned it all there, right? Really? Out in the real ocean? Okay, I guess I can try:

You'll go to some respected college--on a coast, I might suggest--where you'll be one of the many who think this is the ideal career choice. Most of them will be gone before they've completed three semesters. Heading out on a class marine excursion on choppy water is never fun, but combine the stench from when the boat is used for non-academic commercial fishing, and the hangovers from frequent dormitory beer bong parties, and it's silly to think many typical undergrads won't find a better major without the nautical obligations.

You'll stick, though, and your passions will carry you through the four years with honors. You'll be offered a chance to continue in graduate work, and soon you're published in a variety of obscure quarterlies that only other marine biologists ever see.

There will be a variety of studies for you to participate in; whatever is trendy enough to garner funding becomes your topic of the season. Most of your time on the water is spent close to shore--that's where the interesting sea life resides, and you soon are spending as much time in scuba gear as you are above the water. You continue to work for your mentor, a respected older professor, and the night he drinks too much and confesses his love and willingness to leave his wife of 33 years creates an awkwardness that never is addressed once the moment has passed.

Eventually, you find your passion--fish farms. You study their environmental impact and are shocked to discover that they are destroying countless wild salmon runs and endangering entire species of marine life. Your mentor shares your dismay and the two of you co-author several inflammatory articles denouncing them, while you struggle to find funding to generate a study which will verify the extent of the suspected damage in your particular part of the world.

Meanwhile, your mentor is gradually losing his "edge". First he simply forgets deadlines or misplaces things, but then he becomes increasingly bizarre and begins work on genetically modifying pirahna fish to thrive in cold ocean waters. His plan is to then release the voracious killers near the notoriously badly-built fish farms and let them work their magic.

You cannot stand by and watch him ruin the reputation of your department or your college, so you report his eccentricities to the department chair and soon a retirement opens the door for you to replace your former guide as a full-fledged professor in the marine biology department.

Your mentor is furious. A series of strange occurences put you on edge--coming home to find pirahnas in your bathtub is only one manifestation of an obssession to destroy you that never rests.

The stress of your ex-mentor's harassment makes you welcome the opportunity to go out into the field--you are following some tagged salmon far from shore to assess their condition. You travel with two men--fortunately with your looks being the only female on long lonely ocean trips will never be a problem for you, despite the quiet desperation you once inspired in your mentor. This trip, like so many before, looks to be worthwhile but uneventful. Your two partners seem to be professional and knowledgable--graduates of the same university as yourself.

News of the tropical storm comes surprisingly late--it will take a sudden turn in your direction, and as you are well out in open sea, you'll be forced to make a run for the nearest inhabited island. Unfortunately, that island will still be far away when you settle in for your four hour sleep break (the sea is surprisingly calm but the storm will be bearing down on you) and you will wake to hear your partners' incredible explanations of how not one but both motors have fallen off your craft.

You try your radio, but it is dead. Fortunately, your colleagues tell you, they already radioed for help before the radio died. You settle in with them to watch the movie permanently stuck in the cheap, defective VCR powered from the boat's battery--"A Perfect Storm". It merely brings you closer to panic.

Then you will be relieved to hear the beat of a helicopter fast approaching. It hovers over your vessel and lowers a ladder. You are so adamantly against having any special courtesies attached your being a woman, that you insist on being the last pulled from the boat. The problem sadly will be that after both of your partners are safely in the aircraft, the ladder is not lowered for you. You look up and recognize the face of your former mentor shaking his fist and laughing above you.

Then it all makes sense--your two partners were also his proteges, and eager to help with his plan to destroy you.

With luck you'll finish your 22nd viewing of "Perfect Story" before your boat is swamped and you shivver to a watery grave.

The Cynical Career Counsellor Explains Your Future as a

Bus Driver

Oh, hi--you the guy who wants to drive bus? I expect your future is going to be fairly easy to figure out.

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--the stretch limo, and it's 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 upholtery. 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.

Whatever you do, don't drive school bus. My brother did that for a bit, and let's just say, you don't want to be the guy going back to beat on a 12 year old shown on the surveillance video sent round the world...

The Cynical Career Counsellor Explains Your Future as a

Longshoreman

Hey kid--so you want to be a longshoreman? Well, I heard your language out on the field after you lost the soccer game the other day, so you've definitely got the vocabulary down. It won't be easy, though.

First of all, it's tough to break into the longshoreman biz unless you are related or connected to someone already there. You're not? Well then, there is one other option, but it has its risks. You'll need a good camera with night vision and a telephoto lens. Hide out for several nights, and no doubt you'll see all manner of felonies occur. Take good pics of the most serious, and get license plates and faces of all involved. A murder/body dump is your best bet.

Then it gets tricky. You'll need to make copies of all the photos and relevant information and place them in safety deposit boxes in different banks. Choose three people you trust, give each a key and instruct them to send the key and a sealed letter to a reputable news outlet if you should go a week without contacting them.

Make sure you choose one person of the three who isn't much of a friend--that's the one you're going to give up to the Teamsters when they say you're bluffing about the "I've got information that will go to the authorities in the event of my death" thing. They'll go kill your friend and find the information. Then they'll believe you've got more, and likely that will buy your life.

Of course, there is always the chance they trust their torture skills enough to simply try to force the identities of the other friends out of you. It's more likely, though, that they'll admire your tenacity in pursuit of your career goal and welcome you into their fold.

Then it's the gravy train for you, at least for a while. So much stuff "falls out" of containers being shipped, and you learn from the other longshoremen the best places to sell the electronics, clothing, watches and liquor you sneak home each week. Every so often you'll make a few grand to look the other way when a container of illegal immigrants from China arrives--you make even more when you help dispose of the ones who died in transit.

Of course, nothing good lasts long, and the other side of working the docks isn't much fun. There are the tarantulas and other tropical critters that come packed with the bananas and produce from southern climes, and epidemiologists all too often call seaports "ground zero" when describing the arrival of some new deadly infection.

Your end isn't too easy to predict, though. You see, between mafia/teamster/triad gun battles, poisonous insects, deadly viruses and "accidental" drownings, there are plenty of opportunities for you to leave your widow a hefty pension. Even if you don't get killed at work, the feds are eventually going to bring you down in some sting operation involving fake designer products and the third world slave trade.

At prison you'll encounter violent gangs of wide variety of ethnic origins. Some will remember you gouging them when they smuggled their drugs or other contraband into the country. They won't like you, and they'll make sure you know it. On the bright side, you'll be able to swear in fourteen languages when they're practicing their national form of deadly martial combat on your kidneys.

Hey, if you get any "discount" scotch, remember my number, okay?

Want to come to a show?

If we figure out all the technical stuff (and thanks Geoff for all the help there, btw) we'll be fine.

My trip to Van got postponed--they didn't have any lights in stock, but now it looks to maybe be a go this coming week.

My neck and stress level are both giving me problems, but now I've got better meds for the first, plus some, er, homeopathic (cough*hippie*cough) medicine for the second.

Tonight was surprisingly good medicine for the stress, and I must say I do live in a beautiful city, even it rains more than I would like sometimes.

Sorry the posting has been sporadic; we're at the scary last week before our first "preview"--a shortened matinee--and then it's a week long run. Once this is all settled I suspect life, and posting, will return to normal.

Best wishes, and broken legs to the superstitious, to my H-burg friends on Suessical--does it open this weekend? Are there pics on line anywhere? Inquiring minds want to know...

The Cynical Career Counsellor Explains Your Future as a

Microsoft Certified IT Professional

Hi kid--so you want to be the IT guy? Well, I suspect it might be something like this:

You'll save up the money you make from selling pirated software and eventually go to one of those "certified" Microsoft places. There you will learn about ethernet hubs and the latest version of Windows or whatever the hell the think you need to know when the office staff are panicked because their email won't work. They'll also teach you the importance of buying every patch and updating any microsoft or affiliated company products which spew forth each month.

You'll get hired on at some middling insurance or investment company and there you'll soon make yourself invaluable--the network is so buggy and flawed that it needs tweaking on a daily basis, and only you have the insider knowledge to make it function. You'll also practice the other things they've taught you at the training institute; you mock and abuse everyone for being less computer savvy than yourself, and you make a nice second income blackmailing those whose porn surfing you discover when checking web logs. You'll also cover your ears and scream whenever anyone says anything counter to MS orthodoxy, like the idea that Linux is a great user-empowering operating system, or that the main problem with Macintosh is that they didn't properly copyright a window-based operating system before MS ripped it off.

Eventually you'll want to move onto the next level, and you'll go to the elite technician seminar held in Washington state each year. There you'll hear about even more ways you can make yourself indispensible to companies which let you abuse them while you manage their computers. You'll also learn that you are able to double dip--earning ever higher tech salaries from helpless corporate technophobes, while secretly getting kickbacks from Microsoft each time you con your employer into buying yet another "better" operating system.

It sounds pretty good, doesn't it? That's why what happens next will be so tragic. You'll be wandering through the hallways of the vast Microsoft complex in Redmond when you'll make a wrong turn--you're looking for the one passable-looking female in the training group who wandered off earlier, and you happen to slip through an unlocked door (they're good at electronic walls and gates, but with the real ones, the geeks slip up sometimes)

You see something there that shocks you--Bill Gates is talking to a large screen--to Bill Gates. You don't understand it, but you're fascinated. They're arguing about some things you don't fully grasp, but later, when you're strapped on a gurney by the MS security drones it is all explained to you.

Bill Gates is a twin. His secret brother, Brent, is hidden on an island somewhere in the South Pacific where he is the mastermind behind a shadow corporation that makes knockoffs of windows products for sale in Asia and creates most of the viruses and other attacks aimed at whichever version of windows is most current. They are constantly locked in an almost mythic battle that most of the world is not aware of--but you will be. (He's also the actual person in that widely-circulated old arrest photo--not Bill)

You won't be able to do anything about it, though. You won't be killed--Gates has a weird fear about one day being hooked to a lie detector and asking if Microsoft has murdered anyone, so he insists on your joining the band of brain-implanted gardeners who wander the grounds of Microsoft and his various estates.

Unfortunately, because the implant is a MS product, you'll need to have your head cut open every 90 days for an update or patch. On the bright side, you'll have access to a mental catalogue of all the major weed species of the Pacific Northwest just by tapping your forehead with a rake.

Hey, could you figure out why my computer freezes when I go to the Dixie Chicks fan page?

The Kid Who Sits Behind You Explains

And Then There Were None

So this book is all a bunch of losers who go to an island because somebody they vaguely remembered invited them for free grub and rooms.

I mean, really, if I got that invite, I'd be all "time share, whaat?"

Like my parents got this thing to go to Arizona one time, but then they kept them in this hotel for like 11 hours without hardly lettin' em go to the can or nothin. It was time shares.

Anyway, this book used to be called "Ten Little Indians" and then people were all "That's racist, dude" and so they went and named it the last line of the same little ditty. Like that makes it okay.

So these stupid people show up and are all "Where's the food, booze and digital cable?" But there's this record and a voice that's all "You people suck and are killers."

Then they get offed.

How stupid can you be though--I mean after the first couple die, wouldn't you be all "Hmm--I'd better watch out somebody's gonna try to off me"?

Plus this Agatha Christie writes hella weird--when people talk it's all:

"I am talking after a colon in a new paragraph dude."

Anyway, I think if you read to the end it tells you who offed them, and it's one you figured was dead, and then you're all "oh yeah" but then you're bored and so you don't care.

The weekend that was...

Friday: We got smug--predicted crazy windstorm never materialized that night. Got a visit with my wife's sister and one of her daughters that evening, they are here from Winnipeg for the first time in quite a while.

Saturday: Another visit with my wife's sister and two of our nieces this time--the wind is crazy, and I manage to just get my specialty--vegetarian lasagna--out of the oven when the power goes out. So we had a nice dinner by candle and camping lantern. It was fun.

Sunday--the wind was gone, as was the rain, but for some reason we had several random short power outages during the afternoon. Supper was at Boston Pizza, where all screens were on the Superbowl.

Random rant: U.S. networks charge millions for Superbowl ad time. Thus, the companies who purchase those spots debut multimillion dollar amazing commercials that are attractions in themselves. We here on this side of the border never see those ads--our cable companies cut in lame Canadian ads in their place. I hate Bell Mobility--their stupid beaver commercials kept running over and over. Grrrr.

The Seahawks made it close while were were in the restaurant--14-10--but then it went downhill. The fans in the restaurant weren't thrilled by that--Seattle is our closest NFL team, and of course all our U.S. TV coverage comes from there. I was not concerned either way; I'm not a big football fan, and actually, the only NFL player to come from my small home town, Roy Gerela, was a long time Steeler kicker.

Now to go make a final exam. Bleah. Anyone want to come build and paint a Wizard of Oz set for me?