The Cynical Career Counsellor Explains Your Future As A

Tour Guide

Oh, I know you--you're that foreign languages club kid. How many you speak now, anyway? Oh--well, German could be valuable, I guess. You taking anything special course wise this year? Tourism, eh? Great program that--preparing kids for the minimum wage careers of the future. So--a career in tourism? How 'bout you try travel agent? Yeah, I guess, but office work ain't so terrible... all right then, tour guide it is.

So, you'll get on the local tourist runs--seasonal work, low pay, occasional tips. In return, you'll deal with the idiosyncracies of weirdos from all nations. You can't help but make mistakes too, using the wrong word for something and offending an entire busload of people by accident, but still, at least you'll get to know the three or four bus drivers who become your regular companions driving around the same tired tourist traps for four or five months a year. Naturally, since you speak German, you'll get those groups most, and you'll begin to develop some strange suspicions--you walk off the bus for a moment and get back to overhear the words "fourth reich" muttered in clipped Prussian accents and then they all look shifty and change the subject when they see you to something more innocuous.

If it only happened once or twice, you'd ignore it, but it happens over and over, and you get a little worried when you hear too many of them humming songs you recognize from archival footage of rallies at the Brandenburg Gate during the late 1930s. Finally you decide something is up--perhaps these bus trips are some sort of front for neo-nazi plotting, and you report your suspicions to your supervisor. He looks at you incredulously, and recommends stress leave. You realize his last name is Von Braun, and decide he's in on it--so you go to the government, to tip them off about the plot.

Eventually you get a little "holiday" in a psychiatric respite center, and it's only when one of your fellow employees feels guilty and sends you an anonymous letter that you clue into the fact that each time you stepped off the bus your "friends" the bus drivers clued the passengers in to a little "let's freak out the tour guide" game they enjoyed playing so much. Seems they figured with their air brakes tickets they shouldn't be making 50 cents an hour less than you.

You are released from the psych ward, and you abandon local tour work to take a job with a group that tours elderly north americans through europe. Of course, the tours are not sightseeing as much as endurance, since one really can't "do" seven countries very well in ten days, and you're forever having to go out hunting for the one or two old dears who get lost and haven't made it back to the bus. Plus, the air conditioning invariably dies just as you hit the hottest part of your trip, and I won't even begin to describe the repulsiveness of the "biffy" at the back of the bus--you do your best to dissuade your charges from ever using it, but they're old and stubborn, and along with the broken air conditioner that disfunctional bus accessory also makes the trips even more hellish.

Every so often one of the groups includes a younger man--perhaps the child of one of the elderly tour members--and the ancient busybodies make it their business to matchmake you, thereby guaranteeing that no romance will ever develop. Pushy local bus drivers hit on you regularly as well, but you know they're just after a quick fling or a chance at getting out of their country's hellish economic situation by following you back to the land of the free.

Still, despite all this, you fall for one driver--Pedro--four years into the monotony of the job. He seems different--he's cute, he listens and he seems to care. You fall into a romance almost without realizing it, and actually begin to feel the unfamiliar sensation of happiness. You don't even notice the tour company supervisor sitting near the front of the bus when you step up from the Roman street to plant a kiss on Pedro's cheek, and squeeze his shoulder. His pulling away and yelling seem strange, and then he immediately files a complaint to the already disapproving supervisor sitting nearby. You are fired and sent home immediately.

Not to worry, though--there are plenty of souvenir shops or whale-watching ticket booths around. There's always lots of low-paying deadend part-time seasonal tourism jobs for someone with your training and skills. Plus you'll be familiar enough with the youth hostel system that you'll be able to negotiate a monthly rent for your accomodations--which is good, because it's all you'll ever be able to afford.

And you'll still have enough left for an adequate supply of kraft dinner and lice shampoo as well.

Guten tag.

The other 44 Career Counsellor posts can be found here.