Nothing turns a woman on like a guy with a cool job. And when your real job doesn't qualify, it's time to lie. This month, you are: A Bomb Squad Commander.

PICK UP LINE

"I can tear apart the biggest bomb ever made but I have super sensitive fingers"

YOUR JOB:

Like all men in blue, you protect and serve. But as a bomb specialist, you play with fire. You investigate one or two bomb threats a day (more when there's been a highly publicized blast or a violent turn of world events). You do whatever it takes to neutralize or safely detonate explosive devices. And you hunt down, blast-happy psychos before they can destroy lives or property.

Your Training: Before the bomb squad accepted you into its death defying brotherhood, you held any or all of the following positions: You were a demolition engineer in the marines, with particularly haunting memories of 'Nam/Beirut/Baghdad; you were an inner-city firefighter who saved a girl and her dolly from a raging inferno; you were a beat cop with a taste for revenge; you were a homicide detective until it got personal. And then the elite squad called, and you cloistered yourself for five weeks at a top-notch bomb school: say, the FBI's Hazardous Devices School at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama.

Your Gear: You use a portable x-ray to investigate the contents of mysterious packages. A 75-pound PS-820 bomb suit with 14 layers of Kevlar and a ballistic face shield protects you from non-nuclear explosions. A Neutrex water cannon with an infrared sight fires a blast of water at ultrahigh speed to shatter suspected bombs from a safe distance. Or if there's room, you can keep your own limbs out of danger by calling in the Remotec Hare 11, an 8-wheeled, remote-control robot that x-rays packages carries and fires the Neutrex, and manipulates bombs so you don't have to. A steel drum, 11/2Anches thick, called a Nabco Total Containment Vessel (TCV), can contain the blast of 10 pounds of C4 plastic explosive. A pair of highly trained bomb-sniffing dogs--call 'em Taz and Tanya-help you out, in day and night shifts.

YOUR LINGO:

Go up on a device--Approach a suspected bomb on your own two feet, instead of by robot or with a canine proxy

Hand-enter--Open a device by hand, a last resort when there's not enough time or space around a suspected bomb to use the robot, the TCV, or the Neutrex

Stop the chain--Disarm a bomb by disrupting the link between its explosive components

Looks good--A package appears, in an x-ray, to contain wires, batteries, explosives, switches, and other bomb parts.

Code 100--The broadcast designation for a citywide emergency involving an explosive device likely to blow up.

CONVERSATION IN A CAN:

If she asks: "Are you worried about death?"

You answer: "Why worry? I'll never know what hit me."

If she asks: "Do you respond to every silly threat that comes in?"

You answer: "We rank the threats from one to five, with Level One threats posing the greatest danger and requiring the most attention. But we take every call very seriously."

If she asks: "What do you do when you're messing with a bomb and you suddenly realize it's going to explode?"

You answer: "Above all, you try to remain calm. But then you just turn tail and run as fast as you can. You'd be amazed at how fast you can run in a 75 pound bomb suit."