The Cynical Career Counsellor Explains Your Future As A

Newscaster (by request)

Ahh--I remember you. You know when you taped me by the principal's car after that staff party? I wasn't really peeing... It was all just a joke. You have destroyed that video, right? Good. So, you want to be a newscaster? Hmmm--I think it will look something like this.

First of all, you've got that combination of "pretty" and "authoritative" that will give you a leg up on the competition. Sure, if you looked good and were a visible minority, you'd get there quicker, but still, you've got the right... tools for the job.

You'll need to take some sort of training--there's hundreds of programs all over that will let you study broadcasting while practicing in the college's studio and then working as an unpaid intern--which is another word for slave--at the local cable access station. At the station you'll run cameras, aim lights, and help prep guests and on-air "talent"--though calling the bunch of freaks and weirdos that vie for time on those stations that nobody watches is stretching it just a bit. You'll chuckle at the program warning that UFO's have landed and the aliens are among us, and you'll cringe every time you get assigned to tape "The Golden Age Nudist Music Appreciation Show" with naked 70 year olds dancing to scratchy jazz standards.

Eventually you'll get your chance in front of the camera. It may be a local dog show, or the big scout jamboree, but you'll get to lead a one-man camera crew around while you stick a microphone in front of a variety of inarticulate clods. Your parents' investment in your teeth and your perfect skin mean that the camera is your friend, and it isn't long before a real station agrees to let you do your next work experience placement in their newsroom.

You thought you'd been blessed with a clean, wholesome beauty, but soon you're having an anxiety attack whenever a small pimple appears on your face, and you borrow money from your parents to finance the plastic surgery you're convinced you need until too late you realize it was just the wonky picture tube on your old television that made your nose look crooked. Still, you become skilled at doing the fluff "around town" pieces for the evening news, and when your internship is finished, you are offered a job which pays pathetically little, but gets your face on the screen.

You do that mundane schtick for a year or two, and then when one of the two regular evening news anchors takes a job in a bigger market, they decide to give you a shot at the coveted anchor chair. You aren't the most experienced or most qualified for the job, but the producer knows you'll look good in those ads on the sides of buses, and you'll distract from the bulbous alcoholic's nose that dominates every shot of your veteran anchor partner. He, of course, soon resents your easy rise to equality with him, and takes every opportunity to belittle your work to the rest of the crew. You ignore him as best you can, and the public warms to you quickly.

Just as you ready to sign a new contract at the end of your first year, expecting a nice raise, there's a newsroom coup, and your producer is fired, and the new one, at the senior newscaster's urging, decides not to renew your contract. Fortunately for you, your new producer will land a good job in another city, and he'll bring you along to his new station.

His mentorship comes with a price, though. He knows you and he are both new to the city you now call home, and he manages to monopolize all your free time until suddenly you wake up and find yourself in a relationship with him. Since you'd been staying at his place anyways until you "settled in", it's an easy transition to make from employee to lover, and your new colleagues assure each other that it's only your willingness to "put out" for your producer boyfriend that got you your new job in the first place.

The constant backbiting grates on you, and one day you decide to test their theory, and you break up with your controlling partner. He assures you that your job is safe, but one day, while you are describing the horrible death toll in the fiery crash of a busload of orphans, he stands beside the camera you are forced to look at, and begins doing his one-man three stooges routine that always cracks you up. You end up giggling on the tag line "and only two of the children survived, and they will be horribly scarred for life" and as you prepare to go to commercial, you burst out in horribly inappropriate guffaws.

This ends your career. No one will corroborate your story about your ex-boyfriend distracting you, and the actual clip of your gaffe somehow finds its way to all the news outlets in the English-speaking world, and you become a topic of vitriolic editorials on the insensitivity of modern media.

You hide in your parents' basement for six months after losing that job, and eventually you regroup and take the only job in broadcasting offered you.

You become the host of a late night infomercial "talk show" focused on promoting a sketchy herbal libido enhancer. Each night you sit on a semicircular couch surrounded by an aging male porn star, an exotic dancer, and an ersatz "doctor" and you furrow your brow and nod supportively as you ask carefully scripted questions about erectile dysfunction and herbal remedies for such.

You tape seven such shows, which run on stations all over North America in the inexpensive late night time slots, and your parents plead with you to adopt a new "performer" name. You collect royalties for these shows and travel to trade fairs featuring the same product--you won't be rich, but you'll get by, until one day when Conan O'Brien does a "where are they now" segment which flashes your laughing at orphans embarassement and then segues to your herbal sex enhancement informercials.

Your employer realizes you are still a laughing stock, and your disgrace is complete when the herbal enhancement company decides you are too ridiculous to even speak for them.

You spend the rest of your days making a pittance as a guest speaker in media ethics courses and selling mail order fruit preserves from your home. On your 40th birthday you receive a card from your former producer/boyfriend with two words scrolled neatly inside:

"You Lost"

Oh, you've got to run now? You're sure that tape was erased, right? Thanks, kid--I appreciate it.