There is a lady who works at a place where I work called Chloe Sparrowhawk. This would be unremarkable if she were, in fact, a sparrowhawk, and more or less mandatory if she were a cartoon sparrowhawk. But she is not. I wondered if that surprises many people when they meet her. I wondered this in part because, as I knocked on her door, reading her door plaque - Chloe Sparrowhawk, Human Resources - as I did so, part of my brain started to consider whether, on the other side of this door, would be an actual sparrowhawk. (The remainder of my brain was busy, of course, with knocking on the door and opening the door. And you may scoff at how relatively easy it is to occupy my entire brain, but I'd like to point out that this technically counts a multitasking). And it's comforting, I find, when you begin to suspect that you've managed to set up a meeting and exchanged numerous emails with a bird-of-prey, to know that you're not alone.

I realised at that moment (now well over the door's threshold) that if she did, in fact, turn out to be a sparrowhawk, then while her name would not be of any interest, any more so that other species-appropriate names such as Donald Duck, Rupert Bear, Kermit T. Frog or Eli Oystercatcher, her chosen profession certainly would be. How would a sparrowhawk end up working in human resources, I began to wonder. Surely the rigourous and unimpeachably scientific practices of human resources would have been too difficult to master by all but the most gifted of sparrowhawks?

I briefly considered the possibility (whilst closing the door behind me) that perhaps she had worked her way up from a previous job in Sparrowhawk Resources. But, of course, I had noticed no other sparrowhawks working at the place where I work, so the office of Sparrowhawk Resources would only have been necessary to deal with the working issues of the sole sparrowhawk employee, who worked in Sparrowhawk Resources. In fact, the only way I could imagine a sparrowhawk working in human resources is if the sparrowhawks had risen up and enslaved the human race, then given in to an as-yet unrealised tendency towards inventory control. But in that case, the conditions of enslavement would have contradicted sharply with the invitation to pop by the office "whenever I was free".

Anway, by that point I was entirely in the office, and able to see that Chloe Sparrowhawk was distinctly human. She was seated, and did not offer me a field mouse, as well as other clues. On the plus side, this allowed me to focus on the purpose of the meeting (mental wellbeing) without really mentioning any of the thoughts I'd just been having. In fact, I realised that in all the human resource meetings I'd ever had, the reality of the meeting was always fair less interesting than how I imagine it might be in the few minutes beforehand. And I also realised that perhaps the reason for this was that the meeting was always with a human, and that a human working in human resources now borders on a cliché.