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My kids recently took those tests that measure your likes and dislikes, so that you can plan your career according to whether you'd rather kiss a girl, crash a computer, or take underprivileged children to the zoo.
The problem with these tests is that even if they accurately measure your personality preferences, they'll steer you into the wrong career.
For instance, if you're anti-social and you love to be out in the woods, they'll suggest that you become a forest ranger. However, every forest ranger I've known spent at least 90 percent of his working time inside a cramped office, toiling at a desk elbow-to-elbow with a dozen other people, all of whom scored high in anti-social tendencies.
With scientific tests, we can identify people who hate being indoors shuffling paper with other people, and then make sure they get jobs doing precisely what they most hate.
It's only a matter of time until we read about gruesome chainsaw massacres inside ranger stations when anti-social tree-loving forest rangers understandably go berserk.
Suppose it turns out that you love little furry creatures. Following your preference, you go to work at the local pet shelter.
Unfortunately, the major job at most pet shelters is to take in cute puppies and cuddly kittens, and then kill them in cold blood five days later. Little wonder that a recent study showed that the employees of a humane society in Florida suffered from extreme levels of stress.
It's the kid who enjoys pestering neighborhood cats with a .22 who should be working at the pet shelter, not the kid who adopts the hatchling that fell from the nest and patiently feeds it with an eyedropper.
Or you may want to communicate with other people. You could end up reading news on television.
And then, when President Bush succumbs to the flu while
begging the Japanese to buy some American stuff (a trade
mission -- who can now deny that our own Gov. Roy Romer,
veteran of many such trips, is presidential material?), you
would say that the president was nauseous.
I doubt that's what they meant. If you're
nauseated,
it means you're vomiting. If something is
nauseous,
it is something that makes you feel like
vomiting. Think of the difference between poisoned
and poisonous,
and you've got the idea.
So, if the President couldn't keep dinner down, he was nauseated. If the President made people vomit, only then was he nauseous.
Granted, I know many people who suffer the latter reaction to a Bush speech. But by all reports, that isn't what happened last week in Japan. The president got hit by the flu, and among other symptoms, he vomited.
However, our communicators can't tell us that. They try
to be polite, so they say he was nauseous,
which is
actually a lot more disgusting than what they were trying
to avoid saying.
Those who wanted to communicate just end up spreading confusion, just as those who love the outdoors are jammed into offices, and those who love animals end up killing them by the millions.
Whatever you like to do, your only hope of happiness lies in finding a job that appears to offer the opposite.
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