Though unexpected, Maddy enjoyed the mid-afternoon chat session with her bipedal housemate. Something he said though, struck her as odd.

“What’s a resource?” she asked, genuinely confused by his usage of the word.

“Well,” he replied, simplifying the language so his feline friend could better comprehend. “It’s basically a stash of products or things that we people consume to make our lives better.”

“And these ‘things,” she queried, “what happens after you ‘consume’ them?”

“Well, we generally just throw away the parts we can’t use and stock up again.”

“So, they’re renewable?”

“Well, sometimes, but more often than not, no,” he conceded.  “Somehow, though, there’s always enough and everything works out fine. It’s not anything you should worry your furry little head over.”

Undue condescension aside, it was clear Maddy wasn’t fully grasping this explanation.

“Okay,” he followed, “let’s take your litter box, for example. The litter inside is a resource. When you do your business, I scoop it out and throw it away. Eventually, I have to replenish the litter because I’ve tossed away a lot of it with your messy bits, or because it’s simply time to change it. I go to the store and buy more, and I do that over and over and over again, nonstop. Out with the old, in with the new, as they say.”

Maddy paused, judiciously assembling the pieces of what she’s just learned.

“So, let me get this straight,” she deliberated. “That place you’ve gone to every day for the last 22 years has a department literally called Human Resources, and you’re shocked that they unceremoniously cut you loose without so much as a pat on the back or a handshake?  Seems to me you should’ve seen this coming your first day there.”

The human slumped in his seat, disillusioned; the specter of a life unfulfilled suddenly haunting his soul.

“One more question,” Maddy asserted, adding a final insult to the human’s metaphorical injury. “In your example, are you the litter… or the messy bits?”