Get out of that box!
Posted on January 18, 2009
It’s very easy to deny yourself something for perfectly valid reasons, then simply put the whole idea aside, and never revisit it. Often, if you think around the problem space a bit, you might be able to come up with a way to get what you want without the downsides.
In our case, we live in a small apartment, but love animals (as pets). We’re also not committed to staying in one country for the next 10+ years, and don’t know where we’ll be going next, so taking beloved pets with us may not be an option, when it comes time to move again. When we left New Zealand, we knew we were moving into a small apartment, so we had to find new homes for our cats, and that sort of thing is a lot easier to do in a country where you have a life’s worth of contacts. In a new country, that would be much, much harder.
Long story short, we decided against having pets, for a number of very valid reasons. But, we still like animals, and would like to have them in our lives.
The challenge is to turn this limitation, and the reasons behind it, into a scenario that counts as a win – if not a win-win.
So, now, we’re casual pet-sitters.
We wrote up and printed out a bunch of flyers, and put them in mailboxes in our building. A couple of weeks later, we got a call, asking if we could look after Pinky – a cute wee Maltese, for her owner, who’s visiting Hong Kong for two weeks. (That’s her picture, above).
The obvious win out of this, is that we get the joys of having a wee dog in our lives for a couple of weeks. However, we’re also experiencing a breed of dog that we probably wouldn’t have bought (personally, I prefer larger dogs, but there’s no way I’d get a dog of the breed I like for apartment living).
Oh, we get paid as well. And have no expenses (all covered by the owner).
So, in summary – this is a triple win – we get a free temporary pet (Win 1), and we get paid for doing so (Win 2). Lastly, we created a win (Win 3) for Pinky’s owner, who wanted something better for her precious pup than a kennel.
I’d like to think it’s a win for Pinky as well – she seems happy enough, and is getting lots of attention and walks, so perhaps that’s Win 4?
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