A-Z of Interesting futures   A: Airport Worker Face it, you always wanted to work with loading luggage on the planes just for the cool spaceport - airport feeling of it. The rough macho hero working in his shitty but impossibly cool clothes. Occasionally he looks up at a plane taking off. For the modern Walt Whitman. B: Butcher You aced the anatomy class but never was interested enough to finish medical school. You're out of work but you heard that they seek people like you down at the local spam factory. Get good with that knife down on the production line on one of earth's fastest growing industries. C: Castrate Singer You always wanted to become something *special* when you were a kid. Here's your chance.. you'll be the center of everybody's attention during occasional periods of your life. And nowadays you won't have to opt out having kids either - just be sure to cryo those balls before you set out on your new career... D: Dealer It's going to be you who introduces STP, Ketamine, DMT, ayahuasca and so on in your 150-population mountain village in Romania. Get that old social machine up & working again, learn some organic chemistry buzzwords to give your clients the idea that you know something about it, pay off the local post office to let your big post packages from South America get through. E: Emu Jockey Going fast was always your thing, though you quickly ran out of new vehicles.. you went into horsetrack racing for a while - but it quickly lost its charm. Now you're stationed somewhere in Australia under a false name with a brand new Oceania passport, and now you are going for the big one. F: Farmer Mother always said that you would be able to learn to not forget watering those house plants. Now that you're 30-something and you know how to water the plants and even sow a rodhodendron or 2 but you feel incomplete: You want the real thing - simulacra is just simply not enough anymore. G: Guinea Pig You read "sell yourself to science" and was disgusted! You feel that commercialism shouldn't be allowed into science. To make your point you plan to give away all your organs for free. You'll meet many friendly faces at the transplant clinique. H: Hitman Maybe you saw "The Killer" one time to many or fancied yourself your block's air-gun champion when you were a kid. Here's your chance to get a good behind-the-curtains look at top politics. Working hours are great, pay is excellent... I: Irish Folk singer This career opportunity is only open to people that know how to keep a straight face and act *convincingly* that what they sing is not funny in any way but old, rough & genuine. For the NLP expert or the drugwarrior that already swam with the dolphines on DMT and want the *ultimate* challenge. J: Javeliner For women only. You've always been jealous of those BIG east-germans "girls" - you secretly want your own moustache too. The pleasure of the raging black market muscle-mass enhancers in your bloodstream. You dedicate your life and body to the art of ribofunk. It's you and Stelarc. K: Kata Sutra Impersonator You were born a boy but always wanted to be more than a girl. Early in your childhood you cherished Barbie as your future id but things change and later on being a riot grrl wasn't enough either, even though you got on quite well with the grrls. 23 cheap plastic-surgery operations later in a rundown area of Bangkok and you'll emerge as a new *thing*... L: Loompanix You always wondered who wrote the books for Loompanics. One day, what looks to you like an ordinary vacuum cleaner salesman sounds the doorbell of your house. Your mind turn from all the weapons you have on your doorstep as he shows you his gold-plated business card. He ushers you inside and in 5 min you close a 10-book deal with the man, who quickly leaves through the back door with the words "don't contact us, we'll contact you"... M: Magnetist You took some physics classes in high school and were fascinated by Mesmer & his gang of magnetists who almost conquered Europe with their miracle tools, hypotism and "animal magnetism". You decided to take Mesmer into the Space Age and bought some industrial strength magnets, and started measuring fields and flows in senseless statistical orgies. Then it was time to introduce the human factor into the equation; you equipped a couple of friends with scrap helmets and started experimenting with telepathy ... And it just went on from there. N: Nail smoker You were just a deluded cigarrette smoker until a year ago. One of your friends came back from India and let you smoke a Kretek clove cigarrette. When you came back to consensus reality, you knew that something had changed. You took it upon you to devote all your energies to hard-core nail smoking. You studied all the available literature, took a trip to Indonesia to visit a factory, and started your own home-grown business "Home of the Nail". When you look out your window in the mornings and see the masses of people gathered down there praying for your clove cigarrettes, you know you have succeeded. O: Odradek You embark on a career to scare the shit out of poets and surrealists by making them think you are their "odradek" or evil, malignant shadow, to shock them into writing meaty, bloodcurling stuff and infecting them with a tingling paranoia that'll keep them alert, or, maybe turn them into shivering ranting drunks. You pack your suitcase with a variety of masks, robes and Cronenberg-esque metal tools, and head for Prague, the base for your surrealist-bashing adventures around Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean. (For mor information on odradeks, see ...) P: Proctologist All these proctologist jokes never managed to put you off, you've become honestly intrested in this area. It's not just your crush all preconceptions approach that has made you contemplate this carrer opportunity that lists on the "loser list" of medical doctors along with Urologists and Gynecologists. Q: Queer Hairdresser You were the best pupil in the whole hairdressing class of '88 but you never found a job outside Ballardland. Tired of working 9-5 during the weeks and the weekends at the SuperMart you wandered the great desolate parking lots at night pondering your misfortune until you finally realized what was wrong. You are coming back now, all it took was 5 min of NLP and now you have the gender preference that'll make the big bucks.. R: Ralph Lundsten wannabe Enchanted by this eccentric Swedish New Age musician's floating soundscapes, you used your last pennies to purchase a small mansion and paint it pink all over with a little help from your friends, you then donned a ridiculous robe and hacked your aura until it looked fuzzier, wiser and more condescending. The following years will be spent tinkering with light music generators and other machines that will help you realize your Utopia: sitting in your pink room sipping Indian ginger tea in a Lotus Position, dreaming of space colonies and letting your machines do the music for you. S: Sex Pioneer You stop at nothing spreading your Gospel of love around the world. Bisexuality, lesbianism, and other tame stuff you already explored in high school. Deciding that animals and old men held no interest for you beyond the first encounters, you dived head-first into plant and machine sex. After having tried most of the plants available in your home town, you crossed three continents in search of new thrills. After a fateful night at Machu Pichu, you started toying with the idea of sex with aliens, but in the meantime you're working on a VR contraption allowing you to have sex with yeast and bacteria. T: Taxi Driver If you're talkative and like to drive around at night this is the perfect job for you. You'll find this job especially satisfying as the your workplace will give you this film like slack feeling all the time. Read "games we play" and go for the rough knowable toughguy on the edge of society. U: Ultra-Light Pilot Ever since you read Schismatrix you wanted one of your own. But... you were a bit unsure whether you could make a living out of it. Then one day you found YOUR way in the Library of Form. In an instant you realized how you could make living out of Ultra-Piloting and you sure as hell aren't going to spread the secret... V: Vacuum Cleaner Salesman In Disguise Your true goal is selling shitloads of Loompanics Books once you get your foot inside the front door. Polish up your fast-talking and/or seduction skills, give those housewives what they need to sign the paycheck ... maybe a Fringeware party? W: WareZ Freak You have one mission in life and that's to collect all the programs you can get your hands on. You never use them, but that doesn't matter... you work daytime as an accountant, at night you take on the identity of "t0 fresh" a legendary console-jockey, jumping from ftp site to ftp site trading WareZ... a bonus with this career exit is that you get an action filled "high profile" life and you'll meet a lot of people. X: Xenobiologist One of the top ten professions, it has a cool sounding name and you might get to know the pres in a moment of national crisis. If you are nice the CIA will let you play with cool toys all day long. If not you'll have to start a website and make a living selling adspace for books like "Area51 Unleashed". Y: Yo-yo master You never learned how to do tricks like "Infinite Prokt" when you were a kid. In your mid-thirties you decided time had come to start training & get in shape physically. So... you picked up the yo-yo again. And you see a bright future for the next yo-yo revival when you'll start touring schools teaching the next generation what has been called "the most noble of all sports". Z: Zine Publisher Late in '88 you got your hands on a copy of bOING bOING, after that your life never was the same again. You adopted a no-care, rough approach to life. You showed up at school in cowboy boots just because you thought it was fun. This week has been spent philosophising on whether it's you that control your Tamaguchi or if it's the virtual kitten itself that runs the show. by Joel Westerberg & Mikael Huss copyright (c) 1997