The Cynical Career Counselor Explains Your Future as a

Psychic

Hi--what's this? A card--well, thanks. Nobody's ever given me a card here before, except for those smartasses who stuck my name on the retirement list a couple of years ago. So what's your career idea? Psychic? You mean you want to be able to talk to dead people and stuff? Oh right, that's a medium. Okay, so what do you need me for? Can't you just predict the future yourself?

What's that? Open the card. Okay. Oh look--it's my personal fortune predicted by you. That's...weird. Read it? Right... "Today will be auspicious because you will meet..." Auspicious? You'll have to dumb it down for the general public, I'm afraid.

Okay, okay. "...a future famous pyschic"....yada yada...uhmm, pretty generic, what? the bottom? "...and you will ask the tired old question 'why don't you just predict your own future' since you don't realize that the one future most pyschics can't see is their own".

Oh, I get it. Clever. So I acted like most rational people and took an easy potshot at your weirdo career choice. You'll complain to who? Oh sure, 'cause I'll look like the bad guy when you just presented me with my future that includes my death by heart attack a year before retirement.

All right, let's try this again. You'll leave high school and try to convince some chinese restaurants to let you write their fortunes, but they really want platitudes with lucky lottery numbers on the back rather than anything specific. Besides, you really can't write something specific and then trust some random waiter or waitress to get them to the right person, and they won't agree to have you hovering about the restaurant staring at the clientele and then trying to squeeze your hastily scribbled predictions into tiny fragile cookies.

You offer to sub for that woman who does the tarot readings down by the hemp store but it soon becomes clear you're too young and too preppy to be taken seriously by those patrons.

And so it goes. Nobody wants a young, fresh-faced fortune teller--and that goes for the newspaper horoscope department, the county fair and pretty much everywhere else. You get a short tryout with a psychic friends phone hotline, but when you won't do the shtick to get the people to stay on the line and buy extra readings, the hotline folks cut you loose.

You are depressed for a while, so you go to a psychic yourself and are told your future lies in the Big Apple. So off to New York you go, hoping that this prediction is more useful than most of the ones you've offered people.

There are no job openings in the psychic field in New York, but after a few unfulfilling gigs at coffee shops and delis, you answer an add to work as a coat check person in the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. You are at least able to interact with people a bit, and you don't have to remember drink orders.

Suddenly, after about six months on the job, you're hit with an inspiration. You notice one sad woman in the line at the coat check--she's hanging onto two kids and looking weary and worn. You want to help her, but beyond a kindly smile you don't know what to do. Then, after she and her children are off exploring the museum, you decide to write her an encouraging fortune. You slip a note in her pocket explaining that you're a psychic and you have a good feeling that things are going to get better.

You hide in the back when she comes to pick up her jacket, and worry that maybe you'll get into trouble for your boldness. Instead, one week later she shows up and after asking around discovers the note came from you. Turns out her husband was in the middle east and was missing--but his reconnaisance group had merely gotten out of radio range and her fears for him were unfounded. She hugs you and thanks you for helping her when she was at her lowest.

This gives you the courage to begin dropping more fortunes into the pockets of jackets and purses as inspiration hits you. You get away with it for a couple of weeks and then a coat check supervisor takes you aside and warns you to stop it. That instruction is quietly reversed, however, when one of the museum's most generous patrons stops by to personally thank you for your perceptive prediction.

Your fellow coat check staffers seemly mostly amused at your antics, though some simply find you annoying. Your fortunes tend to be mostly generic and positive, but still, you rarely have anyone come back and tell you that you nailed it, but there are always a few who return each week to complain that you're an idiot and you have no idea what's happening in their world.

You carry on, undaunted, even when the Village Voice features an article about you which includes two dozen examples of people whose fortunes you got hilariously wrong. In turn, this gives you a sort of cult following, not because people think you can predict the future, but more that they enjoy a chance to share their laughable fortunes--something made easier when a website, titled "Nostradoofus" is created devoted to your work.

Eventually you become too much of an embarrassment to your employers, and the lobby supervisor, a kindly older gentleman you know only as Mr. Parker, takes you aside and explains you have to stop the pocket fortunes. You sadly acquiesce, and find your work days more boring and unhappy as a result. Mr. Parker stops by from time to time and senses your unhappiness, so he always tries to cheer you up, something you appreciate.

You try to return the favor a few months later when you hear his wife has passed away from a sudden heart attack, but he becomes withdrawn, and rumors begin that he will probably retire soon. It is around that time you begin staying late at work to write horoscopes for your own website--which garners only a fraction of the hits of the one which mocks you--because it's easier to type up your predictions on the computer in the coat check office than it is to try to get serious work done in your apartment with your two roommates fighting with each other all the time.

You discover that Mr. Parker has a habit of stopping by a sculpture in the lobby of the museum after everyone's gone home, where he carries on a quiet one-sided conversation before picking up his coat and heading for the subway. It's quiet enough when the floor polishers and vaccuums are turned off for you to hear what he's saying, but you feel awkward about mentioning it to him.

Then one day you hear him say "I guess tomorrow will be the last day I'll be talking to you--but it has to be our secret because I don't want anyone to try talking me out of it". You're sure he's planning to just retire after the next day without any fanfare, and you realize that he's probably still grieving his wife's death and maybe some time away might help him move on.

Because you appreciate what he's done, you decide to write one more "coat check fortune", and you simply tell him that "while we'll miss you, after today everything will be just fine". You seal it inside an unmarked envelope and slip it in his coat.

The next day the museum is buzzing with the news that Mr. Parker committed suicide on his way home from work by stepping in front of a subway train. A few hours later the police come and take you to a small office where they ask you what you knew about his state of mind. You're puzzled until you discover that they found your fortune, still unopened, in his jacket pocket. Your words are interpreted as proving your foreknowledge of his plan to kill himself.

The staff all shun you for not trying to help their beloved boss, ignoring your explanation that you didn't really know his plans, and you eventually quit your job at the museum. You're desperate for some kind of work, and the writer at the Village Voice who helped make you a cult laughingstock feels guilty enough to get you a job taking phone-in classified ads at his paper.

You're bankrupted a year later when Mr. Parker's daughter sues you for not trying to help her suicidal father--the legal fees alone are far more than your meager income can manage. Around that time you're taken off the classified phone line at the paper because of your increasingly odd behavior--you begin offering unsolicited predictions of doom to those trying to sell their household goods. You're sent to a psychiatrist, and institutionalized indefinitely.

I'd come visit you in the nuthouse but apparently I'll be dead by then. Have fun.