2005年NPR美国国家公共电台六月-Living Life Among the Dogs, and Loving it（在线收听） |
| On Wednesdays the business report focuses on your work place. And today we continue our Take Two series about people reinventing themselves through their work. This morning NPR's Ketzel Levine profiles a couple who changed their jobs to make a better world for dogs. They left behind steady paychecks, benefits, health insurance and their home in Alaska. Robin Baizel left with the minivan. She cried through most of Alaska. Her husband Greg Gibbs followed, white knuckled, driving a big truck and hauling the mobile home. Their destination was Sparks, Nevada, site of their new business: a five-thousand-square-foot warehouse, lined with rubber mats and feisty mongrels. Are you ready for dogs? And here they come! Oh! They go through microphone. It's OK. I'm all right, I'm all right. Have you ever heard the phrase "the cobbler's children have no shoes"? So your dogs have no discipline? They are not the best, always, mannered. Life is good here at the Canine Club, a dog training and doggy day care facility located outside Reno. The paying clientele has gone for the day. These four dogs are the teachers' pets. Among them a pony-size beast with pointy ears on a head the size of a microwave. Hello, this is the boy who started it all. Come here. CD is a Pit Bull/Akita mix, in other words a very powerful and potentially fierce animal. Robin Baizel and Greg Gibbs did not romanticize his origins: this dog was bred to fight. CD was seven months old when they rescued him, knowing he would need some serious training. So they set out to get some training of their own. All because of this big old galoot. Ten years later, CD is a lamb, and the Baizel-Gibbs family is pursuing a new career. The couple left their jobs at the University of Alaska's Consortium Library to buy the Canine Club, a business that came on the market just as they were considering their options. For Greg Gibbs, the club is a down payment on a dream. I wanna be a successful small business owner. I want to be a great boss, you know, I wanna grasp the entrepreneur spirit with both hands. And, this opportunity came along, and we jumped at it, we didn't let the opportunity pass by. They bought the business with money from Robin's retirement plus the sale of the Alaska home. Today they are camped in a relative's driveway: four dogs, three cats, and two humans, shoehorned into a ten-by-twenty-foot mobile home. This is a slightly different environment. Yeh. Just slightly. We had, it wasn't a large house, just about 1,100 square feet. And I loved my little house in Anchorage. But this is OK. It's very homey. And, it's very crowded. Every inch of space cramed with evidence of nine cohabitating lives. When Greg Gibbs, 43, and Robin Baizel, 48, left their steady jobs at the University of Alaska, neither had ever been self-employed. Last year their combined incomes exceeded 70,000 dollars. This year, it's a crapshoot. We are actually paying ourselves 11 dollars an hour. But the number of hours varies week to week depending on the cash flow. No health insurance, no annual leave, no sick leave. No pension. Yeh, what's that? So what do you make the leave you've made? It's a little, maybe harder right now than we thought. But he is giggling. Yeh, it's all an adventure to me. I'm always optimistic. And the marriage is resilient. Never mind the ever-present financial stress. Consider the omnipresent partner. Robin Baizel was sure she was going to lose it during the two weeks they were down to one car. But as the Nevada twilight descends, and the animals sped down, she softens and gives her husband his due. For him, to undertake this, leave a job he was actually pretty satisfied with , he'd developed quite a good job, and give it up, because he wants me to be happy, is the most astonishing thing I think that has ever happened to me in my entire life. I can't imagine ever having done anything where we deserve that kind of loyalty. We'll make it. We'll get through this, no matter what... Oh, I understand... damn optimism up and out again. Oh you have no idea how annoying that is sometimes. Ketzel Levine, NPR News. You can see some family pictures and dog training tips at npr.org. |
| 原文地址：http://www.tingroom.com/lesson/NPR2005/40560.html |