How I enhanced my career using an incident in 2018 where my dog killed my neighbour’s pet bird.
One spring morning in late March 2018, my dog, a Japanese Tosa I named Archibald (after the Scottish Geologist) found his way into my neighbour John’s back garden, entered his house using an opened back door, and killed and ate his pet budgerigar (called Muffin). At the time, it wasn’t clear what had happened. John was knocking every door on the street asking if anyone had seen Muffin, owing to how his back door was open, and seeing as Muffin is uncaged, had likely escaped. A few days later, when Archibald relieved himself in my kitchen, did an undigested beak present itself, prominently sticking out of my pet’s earthy filth.
I’m not fond of John. He’s miserable and angry to his core, which is quite surprising for such a young, attractive, and wealthy guy. Nevertheless, once I had retrieved the beak and washed it free of stool, I went straight over to his house and faced up to what had happened.
A review of my house’s C.C.T.V. system clarified the situation. Archibald had not been fed for a day or so, as I was out the whole day before, returning home late, around midnight. As soon as I returned home, I passed out on the sofa as I had consumed a lot of alcohol. The following morning, when the ingurgitation occurred, I was still completely torpid and Archibald, untethered and famished, made his way over the fence between the two houses and went inside (the C.C.T.V. catches the wall of John’s house, but no more than that, obviously).
John, being the resentful individual he is, took the news badly, and it is only recently that the protracted and petty legal action he instigated has concluded. As you might expect, I lost. Rather than seeing the whole sorry episode as a negative, I have reflected on events and feel that — directly or not — Archibald’s killing of Muffin has shaped and possibly even driven my career onwards and upwards:
1. Pragmatism as a consequence of the destruction of Archibald.
In early 2019, partly because of the incident with Muffin but also because he non-fatally mauled a toddler soon afterwards, Archibald was destroyed by the local council. At the time, I expected to be beyond dolorous, seeing as I had reared Archibald for seven years, ever since he was a puppy, rehomed from a dog breeder belonging to the lowest possible denominator. However, I felt little, and what tinges of sadness I felt bubbling up within my core were swiftly dispelled with clear and active thought.
The sudden loss made me realise, subconsciously, that the show must go on, and that I had it in myself to remain stoic through such crises. In 2020, as the pandemic struck and I was tasked with laying off fifty people from my company, I was able to handle this sorrowful task with little emotion to distract myself from such serious matters, executing the task with the utmost efficiency.
2. The best of us make mistakes, so why hide from them?
It was never proven that Archibald killed Muffin. Even John’s attorney said so. Nevertheless, even as the defendant, I knew what had happened and I was certain that my own stupefaction contributed to the bird’s demise. I didn’t run away from these facts; I owned up to them from the moment the true sequence of events became likely.
The judge lauded my honesty as “commendable and refreshing” and whereas I didn’t get away scot-free — and I never expected nor wanted to — I was able to evade serious repercussions and paid only nugatory damages to John. I have always been an honest man, but found new meaning in being so, thus repositioning my team as respecting and valuing the notion of integrity above everything else. Consequently, there has been a huge culture shift in my team, most significantly of all, my team leaders implementing an open and transparent compensation standard which has driven engagement and retention in my unit to new heights.
3. There isn’t much meat in a budgerigar.
This might seem like a trivial subheading which makes inappropriate light out of a regrettable and tragic situation, but I view the bird’s composition as a metaphor for valuing others. A few hours after John and I argued on his porch about what had happened that morning, he came over to mine and pushed some photos of gralloched melopsittaci through my letterbox. On one of them he had scrawled the phrase “look upon your sins”.
Unwilling to touch the photos until the local constable arrived to fingerprint them, I studied these photos — on my knees, on the floor — in my hallway. Physiologically, there’s nothing to a budgerigar, but despite their diminutiveness, John was heartbroken. The greatest and most meaningful takeaway from that fateful day in March 2018 was that the smallest, slightest thing can mean so much to someone, no matter how loathsome they are as a human being. As my career burgeoned over the years, I came to acutely understand how small things can mean the opposite to people, and that context is key. I look to a client’s or colleague’s protestations and will always and for ever more act on the assumption that their plight — however small — could well be their own personal Muffin.
