The Cynical Career Counselor Explains Your Future as a

Personal Trainer

Hi there--congrats on being winning that homecoming king thing. Personal Trainer? Hmm--you have the wholesome, athletic look going on--that probably helped you win at homecoming, I guess.

It will mean working hard in college--taking a lot of courses that explain how the body works and where the muscles are, but you should be able to find smart girls to date who can help you out with the assignments.

Once you're done, you'll likely go to work for some fitness studio or recreation center as staff or as someone they hire out by the hour to people who want personalized attention as they try to fulfill their new year's resolutions. You'll learn to laugh at their jokes, share insipid ones of your own, and flash those perfect teeth when they need a little encouragement.

Still, it won't quite be what you hoped for, and you'll long for the day when you can set up your own business--a small studio where you can book higher-end clients and don't have to share the revenue with an employer. Eventually you'll save up enough that, coupled with your smile and charm, you can afford to set up a spot for yourself in a strip mall on the edge of the good part of town.

Your business starts slowly. Because you have to fit into the vagaries of your clients' schedules, you often have your first appointment as early as 6:00 a.m., and don't finish until 10 or 11 at night. Not that your days are busy, though--between the few sessions you are able to schedule are hours of downtime--your exercise equipment is the most polished in town.

Then one day it changes--a young man comes in and looks around, then "interviews" you as a potential fitness consultant for his boss, a Mr. Schickelgruber. The next day a large black car with tinted windows pulls up, and you meet Heinz Schickelgruber, accompanied by a young man and woman in their late 20s--both looking like they could give you a challenge on any fitness test.

You spend two hours with the man, and soon he's insisted you call him "Heinz" and is asking you about your family--paying particularly close attention to your ancestry, it seems. He returns a couple of days later, and soon you're into a routine--four days a week--and after a while only one of the silent escorts accompanies him.

Over the next few months you learn more about him--he grew up in Argentina, on a ranch, where it seems he lived a privileged but disciplined lifestyle. At 40, he has come into a sizeable inheritance, he confides, but with it comes a variety of responsibilities, about which he will say little more.

He was raised by his mother and "the staff" he reminisces to you one day, explaining that his father--"a weakling"--killed himself when Heinz was only 12. "I wish I could have known my grandfather", he confesses, with a faraway look in his eyes. You have learned to say little during these post-workout chats over a smoothie at a nearby juice bar. He's paying you double your normal rate, justifying it by explaining he needs you to be on call 24 hours a day.

One day he surprises you by saying he has more customers to bring you--his staff. He wants to begin a regime of individual and group workout sessions. While you can manage the individual training in your small studio, you rent space in a nearby office building for the group sessions, and Heinz pays to have the room outfitted with mirrors and a sound system.

You start them off with basic aerobics, pilates and some jazzercise, but then one day Horst, Heinz's young, efficient assistant, quietly brings you some cds and explains the group wants to try a new type of workout that's "all the rage in Europe". You've been through every trendy fitness craze from boxing to strippercize to "hot yoga" so nothing surprises you, even Horst's insistence on teaching you "fitness marching".

The music isn't your type, but you weren't all that attached to the mindless techno you had been using before, so the switch to the brass-dominated martial music that now echoes through the mirrored gym isn't difficult for you.

Over the next few months you get to know the class members--Heinz's "staff"--socially, and one time or another you have liaisons with most of the women, young, with perfect teeth like your own. When you suggest precautions before each encounter, the girls all laugh and say something cryptic about appreciating your concern, but things will work out for the greater good.

You are worried that Heinz might be offended that you are encroaching in his territory through these trysts with his employees, but he seems delighted that you are enjoying the company of these tall, blonde women, and you later suspect he may be gay--a suspicion which increases when you wake to find him bent over your bed one evening when you accept an invitation to a weekend at his villa, although he insists he was merely "measuring your skull" while you slept.

Over time, though, you realize that Heinz is simply more stoic than most; he feels such passionate commitment to his "work" (though you aren't quite clear what it is) that he feels he need not bother himself with the petty urges that others succumb to.

One day, while the martial music blares as you are working out the staff, the owner of the office building which houses your gym, Mr. Shapiro, walks by. Suddenly, he stops, and angrily gestures for you to come to talk to him in the hallway.

"I've never seen anything in such bad taste in all my life. You are evicted from this building!" You are shocked. You try to explain you don't normally wear bicycle shorts to teach but you were late that morning, but he has already turned his back on you and walked off. Horst comes up behind you to catch the confrontation and mutters something darkly under his breath.

The next day you are informed you will be conducting all of your fitness training at the villa, which the staff call Eagle's Nest. There seems to be a great deal of security, but you don't worry about it too much as you are treated as a V.I.P. by all of the guard detail. You give up your apartment and your original studio, and move into Eagle's nest, where you are set up in a luxury suite.

One day Heinz approaches you with an idea. "You should be a model," he says. "And we can help get you started." You are flattered and agree to a photo shoot. The photographer, Ilsa, is a rather intense young woman all in black. She shoots you in a variety of outfits--from swimsuits to military-like uniforms. You ask when you'll see the results, and receive a noncommital answer.

Over the next few weeks all Heinz will say is that your pictures are for his corporate website, but you're still not quite sure what the corporation is.

That's not the only thing that begins to trouble you. One of the staff girls you'd been seeing before turns out to be pregnant, and then a couple more are as well. You confess to Heinz a worry that you may responsible for the pregnancies, but he just laughs and assures you that if it's true, they will be "handsome, pure children". He also promises you will have no financial responsibility for the raising of the children--he is going to house and educate them at Eagle's Nest.

You're also bothered by the fact that on the rare occasions when you go back into the city, you feel like you're being watched. It's not Heinz's security staff--you know all of them--but rather some tanned men in sunglasses who look vaguely... foreign. On the few occasions you manage to see them without their sunglasses, you see looks of utter contempt directed your way.

One day you are awakened to the unexpected sound of sirens throughout Eagle's Nest. "We've been betrayed!" Horst shouts at you, and instructs you to pack a few of your most important belongings and be prepared to leave within the hour. Shortly afterward, Ilsa, the photographer, comes to your room and tells you curtly that you must drive her to a bank in the city.

She's not someone you'd think to refuse, and soon you're standing by as she berates a teller for taking too long to give her the money that has been wired from Switzerland. As the two of you exit the bank you spot more of the mysterious men who've been following you--three of them are looking at your car and talking. They spot you, and quickly vanish into an alley. You try to say something to Ilsa, but she silences you with a glare and the two of you speed off back towards the villa.

Halfway there a large SUV pulls up close behind you. You recognize the dark glasses through your rear view mirror and try to lose them. Suddenly, as you hit a sharp corner, the SUV pulls alongside and forces you towards the edge of the road--a sheer clifff below. You slam on the brakes, but at that moment they fail, and you and Ilsa plunge to your fiery death on the rocks below.

There will be no public notification of your death. The Mossad cleanup specialists do good work.