The Cynical Career Counselor Explains Your Future as a

Plumber

So--sorry to keep you waiting. You seem a little impatient--but maybe that's good; I see on your appointment slip you want to be a plumber--so for you, time will be money. At least for a while...

You'll go to trade school, probably after you find some plumbing contractor to take you on as an apprentice, in return for your agreeing to stick around for a while and work cheap for them. You'll think it's a great deal at first, but when you meet your fellow initiates in the trade, they'll roll their eyes when they hear the deal you agreed to. All this does is make you resentful for the three years you reluctantly give to your "benefactor" once you are a full-fledged plumber.

You'll quit there after you've done the minimum to fulfill your agreement, and you'll go to work for a big plumbing company. At first it will seem great--you'll almost double your hourly wage, but after a while you'll see all the private contractors who work for themselves and can write off everything from their lunches to their computers at tax time.

You save up what you can, get a loan, and soon you've got your own company van with your slogan and phone number on the side. Before long you pay off the loan and join the construction boom, installing the plumbing in the fancy houses in the new subdivisions where everything looks pricey but is shoddily built.

That aspect of the gig grows tiresome, though, when you put your fifth lien on another bankrupt project in a year, and you realize you'll again be lucky to get 20 cents on your dollar when the proceeds from another court-ordered sale is finalized. It doesn't help that you're newly married and your bride has a penchant for designer labels.

You decide the old fashioned business plan is best--you'll become the emergency plumber whose ad jumps out of the yellow pages because you start your name with more "A's" in front of it than both "Aardvark Plumbing" and "Triple A Plumbers". You know people will be desperate when they call your "24-hour hotline" and hear the recording say that by punching the number to speak to you they agree to the $10 surcharge on your already-exhorbitant prices for the after-hours callout.

Your wife grows tired of being woken your beeper, even though it's providing a nice upscale lifestyle for your family, eventually you find yourself sleeping most nights in the downstairs guest room. There will be other problems, as well--you lose your eyebrows and are nearly killed when repairing a crawl-space pipe on one of the shoddy projects you helped build--seems the gasfitter got careless when he knew he probably wasn't getting paid for that job, and this leads to a small explosion when you light a match after your flashlight burns out.

Still, it's not gas or the scalding from a leaky steam pipe that will finish you in the end--it will be a little less accidental than that.

You see, for many criminals, the toilet (or maybe sometimes the sink garbage disposal) is the last hope when the cops are pounding on the door with a search warrant. Whether it's the drug dealer's kilo, the pervert's hard drive, or the serial killer's collection of spleens, much of what they try to flush will cause them problems they can't easily fix without outside plumbing expertise.

It's only a matter of time until one of them figures you're not to be trusted with their secret, and you have a little accident--lead pipes may not carry water any more, but they still pack a punch.

Have fun--oh, and do the world a favor--coveralls, not lowriders, okay?