Now's your chance to avail yourself of this experience, thanks to -- of all things -- the World Wide Web.

It's a website called "Kingdomality," at http:/www.cmi-lmi.com, put up by a consulting group called Career Management International. The site is a personality test that tells you want vocation you would have been best suited to in a medieval kingdom.

I believe the reasoning behind the test is that the medieval world and the modern one are not so different as you might think. If you discover that your attraction to making people happy and being a boss would have qualifieed you as a first class innkeeper in the 14th Century, that should provide a clue for what will make you happy in the 21st Century.

In those days, it would have been cut and dried. If you were a cooper or a smith or miller or carpenter, those appellations would be added to your name. Today your name might still be Baker or Mason but your knack for hot cross buns or stonecarving may have dwindled over the centuries, and it would be time to take the test again.

The questonnaire only takes about four minutes. It is a series of questions asking you how appealing you find certain job characteristics, and what kind of work gives you the greatest and least satisfaction.

If I sound overly delighted with Kingdomality, it may because I was dealt a flattering future in the past -- I would have made an ideal Benevolent Ruler.

The test said I was an "idealistic social dreamer who wants everyone to be happy" in a world visualized by me. The positive attributes were highly credible: I am "creatively persuasive, charismatic and ideologically concerned." The negatives were way off the mark, however: "unrealistically sentimental, scattered and impulsive, as well as deviously manipulative."

I invite you all to log on and give Kingdomality a spin, and report back to me as to what your role in the olden days would have been. Maybe you would have worked for me, or overthrown me.

To ""Future Shoes"" home page