The Cynical Career Counselor Explains Your Future as a

Microbiologist

Hello, have a seat. Oh, yeah, I didn't see that on the chair, let me... Oh, you brought your own sterile wipes? I guess maybe I should keep a case of them around this office.

So, what career strikes your fancy? Microbiologist? Interesting--I have some definite ideas about how this might go:

You'll need to have really good science marks here in high school--you do? Well, that's just a start. Then you'll have to go to university, and not just for four years. If you want to get into real microbiology and not just be some public health inspector, you'll need at least a masters degree and probably a doctorate.

You'll get some on the job experience during lab placements while you're doing your many years of study. Money will be tight, and you'll be tempted to walk on the dark side a few times--shady characters offering you money to help them infect a rival at work during competition for a promotion, or shadowy agents of oppressive regimes looking for biological weapons to poison their own populace, and willing to pay handsomely.

You'll be strong, though, since you have your eye on the prize. When you finish, your work ethic and your intelligence get you a placement in a laboratory studying some of the more difficult 'superbugs' which are spreading due to the rampant inappropriate use of antiobiotics--yeah, I'm talking about your handiwipes, there.

It's lucrative, and you're paid well not only for your regular work, but also for the many hours of overtime you spend in the lab, working late all alone when it's just you and the custodial staff. You get to know a few of them fairly well, so it pains you when you notice they aren't quite keeping certain areas of the lab as clean as they should, and you have to report them. Seems fastidiousness wins over friendship with you. They hold grudges, though, and that will come back to haunt you later.

It's not long before your hard work and long hours begin to pay off and you're being published in prestigious journals. This helps motivate you to work even longer hours, and you have even less of a social life than you had in college. You have another reason, though, for staying so late--you notice little signs that your work is being tampered with. There's not enough to make any definite accusations, but you're sure the custodial staff is exacting their retribution for your earlier ratting them out, and hitting you where it hurts the most--your work.

You mention your suspicions to your supervisor, and all it gets you is a visit with the employee 'wellness' coordinator, who suggests you might want to use some of the 12 weeks of vacation time you've built by not taking a day off in over four years. You explain that work relaxes you, but you also realize that you can't confide in anyone in the lab--they see your accusations against the janitors as the paranoia of a workaholic nearing a breakdown.

You throw yourself back into the research with more vigor, and the grant money and accolades you bring your employers silences any suggestions that you are working too hard. Then one day it happens--the event that changes your life.

There's a technician visiting the lab--apparently a genius who designs electronic scanning and montoring devices that assist in the early detection and identification off a wide variety of diseases and conditions. He's working with some incredibly delicate sensor equipment; your employers have purchased a unit he designed and he's there to set it up for them.

You come back from your lunch break and he calls you over and asks if there is a foreign radio station nearby. He's got some headphones in his hands and asks you to listen. Very faintly you hear the sounds of voices, speaking in some sort of language you don't recognize. There are, however, a few words you can pick out, and for some reason one strikes you as familiar. You tell the tech expert you can't help him, then ask him pointedly to remove his equipment from your table. He's not even supposed to be in this part of the lab, and he'd put his sensor pickup very close to your sample of c difficile baccillus which had just came in from Syria--a troubling and potentially deadly new strain that your were being asked to examine.

You put on your biohazard gear and take the sample into the appropriate area of the lab, and while you are reading the background on it, you recognize one of the words you just heard. It's Aramaic. The sample's abstract description includes some of the names for the condition it creates, and the word you heard means "danger".

You immediately go back to the technician, but he's leaving--says the sensor pickup is probably defective and he'll bring you a new one. You convince him to leave the problem sensor behind, and take it back to the sample and try to hear more. Sure enough, there are other words you notice, and you begin transcribing what you hear on the headphones that become your constant companion.

The next few months are tricky. You know that most of your colleagues feel you are mentally fragile, and without proof you dare not share your discovery--you'd be made a laughingstock. You build your vocabulary of Aramaic, and even take a university extension course on the language. You try to communicate with them, and eventually you are able to notice unusual patterns and even slight pigment shifts in your petri dish--signs, you are sure, of their attempts to respond to you. You even convince yourself that they are particularly fond of Mozart, and you play it in the lab nonstop.

Then disaster strikes. Another lab working on the same strain of bacillus from Syria has a hazmat breach, and two researchers die within 48 hours. Your lab receives instructions from the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta that you are to destroy all samples of this dangerous material. You are horrified. Your little community is destined for the incinerator.

You offer to transport the samples to Atlanta yourself, but you are ordered to surrender your petri dishes for destruction.

You then break the rules for the first time in your life. Convinced you are the only hope for a world in miniature, you sneak your microscopic friends away and make a run for it. You are caught within two days, and the media paints you as some sort of double agent who was about to poison the water supply of a major city at the behest of some unspecified foreign regime.

When you are awaiting trial in a federal lockup, you are allowed few visitors, though the psych team from military intelligence meets with you every afternoon. Then, surprisingly, three of the custodians from the lab are allowed to see you. They bring a fourth man with them, and introduce him as Dagon. He's been working downstairs, as a custodian, a recent arrival from the middle east. You hadn't realized it, though, because his English was so good when you first met him as a "technician". He smiles, pulls a little lapel microphone out of his pocket, and tells you "good luck" in his native Aramaic. Then they all laugh and leave.

Your best bet is an insanity plea--you might get work in a sketchy animal testing lab after you serve five years in the pen. I see a painful death from an untreatable strain of rabies in your future.

What's that? No, I don't think you're an elephant--though you could probably lose a couple pounds... No, come back, I didn't mean...

Damn. He'll probably never forget that.