Dental Aptitude Test

Few of us arrived at our present station in life without having received counseling from a high school guidance person. These were sincere persons who, armed with out-dated college catalogues, attempted to elicit more than a monosyllabic response from students more interested in interpersonal relationships than academia.

An aptitude test taken at my high school sometime early in the last century indicated clearly that my particular talents uniquely qualified me for a position either demonstrating Amway’s personal hygiene products or as a supernumerary census taker.

I demurred, professing to my high school counselor, a former matron at the Chino Women’s Correctional Facility, that my life’s ambition, once I discovered that dentists had Wednesday afternoons off, was to poke around in strangers’ oral regions. She offered this advice: "Take three years of German for your language requirement; pig Latin is currently not an option. Important research and other interesting stuff are reported exclusively in German. You have to be fluent in that tongue in order to stay on top of things, especially those that can best be described in words of 30 or more characters and half that many syllables."

Years later, when I was in a position to know better, this person had already gone to her reward, otherwise I would have journeyed as far as Argentina to hasten her demise.

Since those primitive times, high school guidance procedures have evolved into a much more scientific placement of students based upon tests designed by psychologists working with MTV producers and juvenile hall parole officers.

The recommendation to study German, although well-received in Deutschland, failed to find acceptance in the United States where it was shelved in favor of graphic arts and design courses aimed at producing more fetching Yellow Pages advertisements.

Thanks to these new comprehensive tests, it has become easier to winnow out those students whose ambitions are at wide variance with their abilities. This is why we currently have a surplus of people who are more adept at discordant guitar riffs than calculating interplanetary shuttle orbits.

A sampling of typical questions follows:

1. In your future, you picture yourself as most comfortable ...

a. On a beach in Barbados with a tall, cool one.

b. With feet up behind an imported teak desk enjoying having a secretary at your beck and call, wearing an Armani suit and $100 underwear (you, not her).

c. Hunched over in an 9 x 10 windowless room breathing potentially fatal halitosis fumes, peering into a dark orifice while actively courting latex dermatitis, fallen arches and varicose veins.

2. Which of the following appeals most to you:

a. Hitting a small ball with a thin stick to direct it into a succession of 18 holes --potential reward: $900,000 to $6.2 million per season.

b. Hitting a bigger ball with a bigger stick entitling you to run vigorously for a short distance -- potential reward: $18 million plus endorsements.

c. Dressing grotesquely, playing a guitar badly while screaming not-nice lyrics to an audience of attenuated cretins -- potential reward: $500 million and early retirement.

d. Convincing a reluctant person that if he will let you drill a hole in his personal tooth, he may spit on your fingers -- potential reward: $91 per hole.

3. Which of the following seems the best career move for you:

a. Drop out of your junior year in high school, continue to live at home at no personal expense while you try to find yourself. In your spare time, work on forming musically clueless groups with catchy names like Chaz Cacophony and the Ditzy Dissonants.

b. Enroll in a creative drama course, striving for recognition as a completely insane person who will be paid $20 million per movie as you champion serial monogamy.

c. Recognizing that lack of character, morals and conscience are no barrier to success, work your way up the political ladder using other people’s money, retiring at $200,000 per year with a big library in your home town.

d. Borrow enough money to see you through eight years of graduate studies, living on saltines and shared teabags, then go to work for 20 years to pay off the student debt, hoping your heirs will be able to handle the balance.

4. In which of the two following events would you prefer to participate:

a. Engage in a contest of fisticuffs during which you allow a portion of your ear to be ingested. Accept $35 million in compensation and the sympathy of the public for this inconvenience.

b. A small child bites your finger to the bone, requiring tetanus and rabies shots. You sooth the child and apologize to the mother for the inconvenience. Everybody laughs.

This type of questionnaire enables high school guidance personnel to accurately single out those students who, having chosen the least likely answers to the questions, will be most successful embarking on a dental career.