Do you ever get the feeling that you're going at it all wrong?

Here I am, week after week, struggling to provide you with the best advice on how to succeed as much as possible while doing as little as possible. I honestly thought you wanted to get ahead in life. Now, thanks to CareerBuilder.com, I understand that what the American worker wants most is to get fired. And if you can't get fired, at least you can be confident that you won't get promoted.

I base this conclusion on two separate articles I recently stumbled upon after a couple of missed keystrokes detoured me from a serious research visit to HellionsofIT.com to the digital job site, where the seeker can find a panoply of helpful hints on how to derail a career.

In “9 Sure-Fire Ways to Get Fired,” Anthony Balderrama tries his best to guide you toward a pink slip, but he does make a few rookie mistakes that could leave you high and dry and employed.

Consider sure-fire, firing idea No. 3, not knowing what your job is. “You're allowed a few growing pains when you're new,” Balderrama writes, “but if six months (or years) into the job, you're still asking people what you should be doing … something isn't right.” I'll say! If you have no idea what you are doing, you're probably a manager and therefore 100 percent immune from firing. Of course, if your direct reports catch on to your highly developed state of executive confusion, there will be cutbacks. You'll have to fire those wiseacres and bring in a whole new batch.

Going on vacation “when you're needed most” is fireable offense No. 6. Not in my world. Of course, you want to go on vacation when there's a ton of work to do. How else are you going to show everyone how necessary you are? “If you're gone every time a major deadline approaches,” writes Balderrama, “your reputation will suffer.” To which you can honestly say, “What reputation?” But I say, to paraphrase the words of the classic country song, “How can they miss you if you don't go away?”

Not respecting the boss in front of his or her boss is fireable offense No. 8. “The boss might not say anything when the head honcho is around,” the writer warns, “but you'll probably have to answer for your mistake soon enough.”

So how do you undermine your boss's authority, and not make it so obvious that you get in trouble? It's not difficult if you compliment your manager to career death. “Jim is a fantastic supervisor,” you tell the big guy or gal, “very few people could come to work late, booze it up all through lunch, and still beat the marketing department in Wolfenstein 3D.”

If all this good advice on how to get bad career news doesn't put you on the sidewalk, CareerBuilder.com also offers “7 Sure-Fire Ways to Kill Your Promotion” by Selena Dahne. Building on the work of Susan Britton Whitcomb, author of “30-Day Job Promotion,” the author suggests that to make yourself promotable you need both “hard skills and, more importantly, soft skills.”

You certainly have the former. You make everything really hard. But soft skills go beyond your ability to start weeping whenever the boss asks, “How's it going?” Not having enough time to come up with nine tips, like Balderrama, Dahne offers only seven, but they're doozies.

Like tip No. 1, “Not dressing, speaking or acting the part.” In other words, “instead of dressing sloppily or inappropriately, strive to dress in a manner similar to people two levels above you.” I don't know about you, but the last time I saw a manager two levels above me, they were being perp-walked out of the courthouse after being busted for money laundering, mail fraud, and wearing a cardigan without a license. I suggest you continue to wear the ratty, moth-eaten, mismatched rags you find in the 5-cent barrel at the Goodwill Store. If you want a raise in title and salary, it's good to look like you need it.

“Pouting and grousing” is tip No. 5 for avoiding a promotion. Probably true, but if it wasn't for pouting and grousing, what would we do all day? “Decision-makers will never be able to support you as a leader, worthy of promotion, if you're being bitter, negative or dismissive of others,” Dahne writes, and she could be right. But let me tell you, your co-workers will love you.

Bob Goldman has been an advertising executive at a Fortune 500 company in the San Francisco Bay Area. He offers a virtual shoulder to cry on at bob@funnybusiness.com. To find out more about Bob Goldman and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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