Big Bird

Big Bird is dead.

Yesterday we found him on our return from a lunchtime curry. He was sitting there in the middle of Purvis Street, bruised and battered a long way beneath his nest in the eaves of one of the shophouses. The next day he was stiff and cold with his legs up in the air in Alphabet's office. Although we'd offered to take him to SPCA they'd shrugged off our offer to pay for the finest treatment known to veterinary science, and suggested that he'd be put down if we brought him in.

So we decided to buy him a cage, and give him some food and drink, and had hoped to be able to release him back to the wild when he got better. But he never did.

It was utterly inconsequential. Blink and you'd have missed the entire episode. It's almost too much trouble to blog about, you might think - and yet that's precisely why Big Bird is getting a mention.

Life is short, and full of nonsense. It is full of people talking bollocks, shuffling paper, discussing where to go for lunch, and searching for lost documents in the shared network. But one day it won't be us doing that, it will be someone else ... because we'll have taken the last taxi to whatever's next after this life.

If we're lucky, we'll make the world a fractionally better place for having been a part of the party. Recycling paper; getting merry at the Christmas disco; teaching government officials how to waste less money on IT schemes they don't need - or to minimise the cost and maximise the return on the IT schemes they do need; building friendships; passing time.

We're not going to win Nobel prizes. We're not going to win a Pulitzer. We're going to, slightly, outperform the wider market, and pass a lot of time together.

That's one of the reasons why Alphabet looks for Alphabet people. People who value their limited time, and try to make the most of it, try to make the world a little bit better. Even to the extent of attempting and failing to save the lives of random small animals that may come across their path.