The Cynical Career Counselor Explains Your Future as a

Plumber (version 2)

Hi kid--what line of work you see in your future? Plumbing? I guess I can tap into a few ideas on that one. Get it? Tap? Meh, I guess if you don't have a sense of humor working by yourself all the time is probably a good plan.

You'll need to go work at one of those plumbing supply places--you could even start now if they're hiring--so you can learn the names of all the various connectors and tools you'll be using when you start your career. Best thing is to chat up the customers; it's how you'll eventually find somebody to take you on as an apprentice.

You'll do fine on the apprenticeship, but the down side will be driving around all day in a stinky van with a your boss who has moved into the vehicle while he and his wife sort out their divorce. Once you have your journeyman papers you'll take your meager savings and buy the tools you need to go into business for yourself.

Your first few months will be slow, but your willingness to take on any job, no matter how small, and your readiness to go out to calls at all hours of the night soon has people passing your business cards along to friends. Word of mouth is augmented by cheap ads in neighborhood newsletters and paying kids to slip flyers into mailboxes.

Eventually you get your van paid off and when you find out your girlfriend is pregnant, you figure you've got enough to make the down payment on a decent house and the two of you move in together. Two years later you're married and your second child is on the way. You've come to realize that you need to work longer and later to pay the bills for your growing family.

The moment that everything changes seems so innocuous at first. You advertise your "call any time--day or night" in bold type in your yellow pages ad, so you're used to calls coming after midnight. This one is from a worried housewife who explains she needs you to come fix a backed-up toilet, and an hour later you're at her home.

She explains that her child is beside herself since the little girl's favorite stuffed animal was accidentally flushed down the toilet. She knows the toy may be a little damaged, but pleads with you to be as careful as you can as you try to retrieve the lost treasure.

You explain the difficult of her request, but you also take great pride in your skill in this sort of situation, and soon you're pulling the offending item from the commode--but it's not a child's toy at all. As you turn to question the harried mom, she's gone and a burly biker type is standing in the doorway, brandishing a tire iron. You look more closely at the package in your hand and realize you've just retrieved a drug stash that must have been flushed.

You nervously surrender the package, which is inspected by the biker, who then favors you with a gold-toothed grin and slaps five hundred dollars into your hand. "Just forget you ever came here" he warns, and you're happy to do just that, but it seems he forgets his own advice.

Three months later you get another late call, but this time you're just told an address and there's a different biker who explains he's heard you're good with this particular problem. You again are successful, and this time you get seven hundred bucks for your trouble.

It's a more common situation than you'd ever have guessed. When drug dealers see cops pulling up outside, there aren't many options available to them, so the toilet flush is a clichéd but often successful act of desperation.

Some of the bigger players eventually start calling you for more legitimate plumbing assignments--they want a new wing on their luxury drug-bought home and you're already trusted so you get the job. You wake up one day and realize that more than half your income is coming from felons, and it worries you.

You become paranoid; you think your home is being watched, or you're being tailed when you drive around town. Your wife gets annoyed as you refuse to go out and spend your ill-gotten gains, preferring instead to hide away in your home with the curtains all drawn.

A month or so after your wife leaves you, taking your two kids with her, one of your worst fears comes true. One of the drug lords you've worked for had an undercover cop infiltrated into his inner circle, and the narc passed your name along to the investigation team. They take you downtown and leave you to sweat in an interrogation room for an hour before they come in and confront you with enough evidence to put you away for a couple years.

You're easily intimidated into agreeing to wear a wire and being part of a large scale drug offensive. You help the team by first suggesting a new protocol that includes shutting off the water to homes before they are raided, which makes it tougher to flush evidence--one tank just doesn't do it, you explain--and your wire records the evidence of those who do manage to successfully get rid of their stash only to call you for your retrieval expertise afterwards.

When the arrests are made and the indictments handed out, you're put under protective surveillance. It's not as simple as your police handlers had suggested; some of the major drug players have powerful connections in various levels of government, and these forces begin working behind the scenes to create problems for you.

They're unable to do anything to break your agreement with the cops--your testimony for immunity on the drug charges--but in an ironic twist, the powerful allies of the crime lords use the same trick the feds used decades ago on Al Capone; they go after you for back taxes.

Seems you weren't very accurate in reporting your extra income from your criminal friends, and a forensic audit easily uncovers several years of tax cheating. Your immunity from drug prosecution doesn't protect you from the tax rap and a few months after your former friends begin serving their sentences, you too find yourself behind bars--not a great situation for a known "rat".

Bad career memories won't be the only reason you avoid the communal bathrooms as you try to live out your sentence.


(I realized shortly after I began this that I'd already done a plumbing CCC post a long time ago, but I like this one better, so I think I'll replace that one.)