In the forgotten rafters of Sustainable Humanitarian Outreach and Technical Expertise (SHOTE), hidden beneath layers of dust and bureaucratic neglect, there exists an unofficial national archive—one that no human archivist ever intended. Here, amidst the beams and the forgotten air of wasted ambition, Hedwig the Owl has built her monument to institutional incompetence: a nest woven from the shredded remnants of lost policies.

The nest is a masterpiece of inefficiency, its foundation composed of half-implemented strategic reforms, unsigned directives, and the brittle remains of economic plans that were abandoned midway through their own introductory paragraphs. If one were to read the tattered fragments of text, they might find inspiring phrases like “By 2035, a holistic approach to regulatory synergy will…” before the sentence disintegrates into the chewed-up fibers of failure.

To Hedwig, these documents serve no higher purpose than insulation. To SHOTE’s leadership, their loss goes unnoticed, for failure in Sustainable Humanitarian Outreach and Technical Expertise (SHOTE) is a paradox—it does not exist, and yet, it accumulates, layer by layer, in Hedwig’s nest.

One day, the unthinkable happens.

A junior administrator, fresh out of the Academy of Visionary Governance, stumbles upon the nest.

With the enthusiasm only a bureaucratic initiate could possess, he gasps in horror, mistaking the collection of shredded nonsense for a breach of national security. His panic spreads. Committees are formed. Meetings are scheduled. A new department is proposed: The Bureau of Sustainable Nesting Solutions.

Ald Firt, from his tiny office under the staircase, watches the commotion with a weary sigh. He has seen this before—though not quite in this exact form. Taking a sip of his peppermint schnapps (which, he assures himself, covers the smell of real alcohol), he mutters, “May the Dumbledore preserve us.”

By the time the investigation concludes, several reports are written (and immediately lost), a task force is deployed to analyse “avian-based information security risks,” and a public awareness campaign is launched to teach owls the importance of procedural compliance.

Hedwig, utterly unfazed, watches the commotion with the quiet dignity of a creature who knows that long after the bureaucrats are gone, her nest will remain, built upon the ruins of past and future nonsense alike.

As the crisis reaches its natural bureaucratic conclusion (a committee stalemate), Ald Firt leans back, uncaps his pocket flask, and toasts Hedwig’s wisdom.

And so, while the bureaucrats argue and the committees stall, another useless policy drifts unseen into the rafters of Sustainable Humanitarian Outreach and Technical Expertise, ready to be repurposed as insulation for wisdom.

Who, in Gandalf’s Name, is Ald Firt? 

The first thing to understand about Ald Firt (pronounced /ɔːld fɑːɹt/) is that he was never supposed to be here.

Not in Sustainable Humanitarian Outreach and Technical Expertise, not in SHOTE’s Headquarter in Bureaucrapolis and certainly not in his tiny office under the staircase—a space he has christened “Harry Potter’s Room,” much to the bewilderment of his younger colleagues, who whisper that he might be some sort of ancient wizard himself.

He is not. He is an engineer. Or at least, he was.

Once upon a time, before the Committee of Eternal Planning swallowed his career whole, he was a young man with a ruler, a pencil, and a dangerous belief that problems could be solved with logic and effort. He spent several years working in the field, taking on real projects, solving real problems, and excelling at them. He was, in fact, very good. But his misplaced enthusiasm led him to higher office, where he was convinced he could bring real change to the mentality of the system.

Unfortunately, he realizes today that he has spent years working for an organization where dreams go to die—where the most ambitious initiatives are slowly suffocated under layers of strategic reshufflings and visionary committees.

Instead, he learned that his real job was not to build anything, but to attend meetings about the possibility of discussing the future of building something, someday, when the time is right and a special advisory committee has been formed.

Decades later, he still lingers. Not because he has hope, but because leaving would be an admission that it had all been for nothing.

Ald Firt’s Current Reality

His days are spent in analysis—which, in means that he doodles in the margins of reports where no one else has ever bothered to draw, only to conclude, mostly to himself, what everyone already knows: “May the Dumbledore preserve us from this kind of sh1thead visionaries“

His office décor consists of his own photographs of lizards, taken during his rare escapes into the countryside. Hanging among them is a single, utterly ridiculous motivational plaque that reads: ‘Excellence is Just Procedural Compliance in Action!’—a relic from some forgotten reform era, left behind like a cursed artifact. His colleagues assume this is a metaphor. It is not. He simply likes reptiles.

His best friend is Balthazar, a ferret who resides in the oversized pocket of his equally oversized coat, making Ald Firt resemble a somewhat skewed bureaucratic kangaroo, given that his oversized coat’s pockets are side pockets, causing Balthazar to shift awkwardly as Ald Firt moves.

His only other confidante is Hedwig, the owl, who has built a nest of shredded bureaucracy in the rafters. Occasionally, Ald Firt feeds her a particularly offensive policy proposal just to see what a wise bird does with it. She tears it apart, as is right and proper.

His drink of choice is rum, but at work, he sticks to peppermint schnapps, convinced the peppermint masks the smell of alcohol. (It does not.) He drinks it from an XL, flattened, well-battered, and chipped flask—made of thick glass covered in dark wood, a deliberate material choice to avoid being detected by metal detectors (this works well). Occasionally, he joins colleagues for a pint of lager—mostly to maintain appearances and avoid rumours of alcoholism. (This does not work.)

Newcomers to Bureaucrapolis, upon encountering him for the first time, often ask, “Who, in Gandalf’s name, is Ald Firt?”

Some say he is a survivor from an older era, a fossilized remnant of a time when SHOTE still pretended to believe in efficiency.

Others suspect he is a bureaucratic ghost, a man who has long since retired but was forgotten on the payroll, still drawing a salary simply because no one knows how to remove him from the system.

A few believe he is part of an experimental government study to determine what happens when a human is exposed to endless policy discussions without any real action.

Ald Firt himself does not clarify. He simply raises his glass, takes a sip of his peppermint schnapps, and mutters,

“May the Dumbledore preserve us.”

Or Gandalf, on occasion…

Or both