全新版大学英语第一册第五单元 The Company Man课文.docx

全新版大学英语第一册Unit5 The Company ManText A Ellen Goodman presents the story of a man who works himself to death attempting to be perfect company man. In doing so she reveals the dangers that can lurk in an addiction to work to the exclusion of everything else, including the damage it does to family life.He worked himself to death, finally and precisely, at 3:00 a.m. Sunday morning. The obituary didn’t say that, of course. It said that he died of a coronary thrombosis — I think that was it — but everyone among his friends and acquaintances knew it instantly. He was a perfect Type A, a workaholic, a classic, they said to each other and shook their heads — and thought for five or ten minutes about the way they lived.This man who worked himself to death finally and precisely at 3:00 a.m. Sunday morning — on his day off — was fifty-one years old and a vice-president. He was, however, one of six vice-presidents, and one of three who might conceivably — if the president died or retired soon enough — have moved to the top spot. Phil knew that.He worked six days a week, five of them until eight or nine at night, during a time when his own company had begun the four-day week for everyone but the executives. He worked like the Important People3. He had no outside “extracurricular interests,” unless, of course, you think about a monthly golf game that way. To Phil, it was work. He always ate egg salad sandwiches at his desk. He was, of course, overweight, by 20 or 25 pounds. He thought it was okay, though, because he didn’t smoke. On Saturdays, Phil wore a sports jacket to the office instead of a suit, because it was the weekend. He had a lot of people working for him, maybe sixty, and most of them liked him most of the time. Three of them will be seriously considered for his job. The obituary didn’t mention that.But it did list his “survivors” quite accurately. He is survived by his wife, Helen, forty-eight years old, a good woman of no particular marketable skills, who worked in an office before marrying and mothering. She had, according to her daughter, given up trying to compete with his work years ago, when the children were small. A company friend said, “I know how much you will miss him.” And she answered, “I already have.”“Missing him all these years,” she must have given up part of herself which had cared too much for the man. She would be “well taken care of.”His “dearly beloved” eldest of the “dearly beloved” children is a hard-working executive in a manufacturing firm down South. In the day and a half before the funeral, he went around the neighborhood researching his father, asking the neighbors what he was like. They were embarrassed. His second child is a girl, who is twenty-four and newly married. She lives near her mother and they are close, but whenever she was alone with her father, in a car driving somewhere, they had nothing to say to each other.The youngest is twenty, a boy, a high-school graduate who has spent the last couple of years, like a lot of his friends, doing enough odd jobs to stay in grass and food4. He was the one who tried to grab at his father, and tried to mean enough to him to keep the man at home. He was his father’s favorite. Over the last two years, Phil stayed up nights worrying about the boy.The boy once said, “My father and I only board here.”At the funeral, the sixty-year-old company president told the forty-eight-year-old widow that the fifty-one-year-old deceased had meant much to the company and would be missed and would be hard to replace. The widow didn’t look him in the eye. She was afraid he would read her bitterness and, after all, she would need him to straighten out the finances — the stock options6 and all that.Phil was overweight and nervous and worked too hard. If he wasn’t at the office he was worried about it. Phil was a Type A, a heart-attack natural. You could have picked him out in a minute from a lineup.So when he finally worked himself to death, at precisely 3:00 a.m. Sunday morning, no one was really surprised.By 5:00 p.m. the afternoon of the funeral, the company president had begun, discreetly of course, with care and taste, to make inquiries about his replacement. One of three men. He asked around: “Who’s been working the hardest?” 公司人他终于在星期天凌晨三点整因过度劳累而离开人世。

当然，讣告上没有提及这一点讣告说他死于冠状动脉血栓形成——我认为这就是死因——但是，他所有的朋友和熟人都马上明白是怎么回事他们议论道，他是十足的A型行为者，一个工作狂，一个典型的工作狂，他们边说边摇头，他们还花了五到十分钟的时间想了想自己的生活方式 这位最终于星期天——他的休息日——凌晨三点整累死的人是位公司副总裁，时年五十一岁不过他是六位副总裁之一，如果总裁去世够早或退休够早的话，他本是有望当第一把手的三位人选之一菲尔清楚这一点 他一周工作六天，其中五天要工作到晚上八、九点钟而公司员工除领导层外已经开始实行每周四天工作制了他像重要人物一样工作他在外面没有“本职以外的爱好”，当然，除非你认为每月一次的打高尔夫球也算的话但是，对于菲尔来说，这也是工作他总是在办公桌旁吃鸡蛋沙拉三明治，自然啦，他超重了，超出二十或二十五磅不过他认为没关系，因为他不抽烟 每周六菲尔身着运动夹克衫去上班不穿西装，因为这是周末 他手下有不少人，约六十名大部分人多半时间都喜欢他其中三人被认真考虑当作接他班的人选讣告上没有提及这点 但是讣告上的确颇为准确地列出了他的“遗嘱”，他的遗孀海伦，四十八岁，一个好女人，但没有什么适合市场需求的技能，结婚生育之前曾在办公室工作。

据她女儿说，多年前，孩子们还小的时候，她就决定放弃与丈夫的工作竞争了一位公司朋友说：“我知道你将会多么思念。