Walking to my car, I stepped over a puddle from the recent rain. As I looked down, I saw a bird egg resting in a crack on the sidewalk.

Gently, I nudged it with the tip of my boot and it rolled awkwardly, revealing a broken underside.

I looked towards the building, surmising the rain had somehow worked the egg loose from the roof and washed it down the gutter.

Tsk-tsking, I suddenly had a flash-back to a couple days before…

“Sharna do you have a gun?” I hear my boss bellow from his office.

“Excuse me?” I respond.

“I said do you have a gun,” he asks again.

At this point I am making faces from behind my partition, as if pushing my eyebrows together and scrunching my cheeks will somehow bring me enlightenment.

Is this one of his infamous trick questions? I wonder, rising to my feet.

As I peek around his doorway I respond, “Not with me.”

“What do you need a gun for?” I ask as I anchor myself against the door frame.

“Do you hear that?” he says, pointing at the ceiling.

Now at this point I have heard nothing but the flurry of my own perplexed curiosity bouncing around in my skull, but decide I’ll play along.

“Hear what?” I ask slowly.

“That,” he points to the ceiling again, a strange grin on his face.

Still clueless, I determine I have unwittingly walked into one of his snares.

“I don’t hear anything.”

“There’s a bird in there. It’s driving me crazy,” he says, pointing above his head.

“A bird?”

“It must be nesting in the ducts and it is making noise all the time. I can’t believe you don’t hear it,” he explains.

I have to admit I was relieved… for a second.

“And you want me to shoot it?” I ask.

“I don’t bring guns to work, it’s against company policy. And I’m not going to shoot a bird in the air ducts,” I explain.

Then I come up with an idea.

“Well if he’s just moving in, why don’t you try annoying him, maybe he’ll decide the neighborhood sucks and go somewhere else,” I suggested with a smile.

“I think I will go up on the roof and see if I can get him out,” he says distractedly as I back out of his office…

I don’t think he ever made it to the roof, but he stopped complaining about the noise.

Looking at the broken egg, I wondered how long it would take for him to notice the silence.

Ah well, nature abhors a vacuum.

In no time another bird will see an opening in the roof and decide to build again.

Besides, it’s kind of funny when the boss has birds in the ceiling.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.