Story 168: Reza Shadey and the Midnight Maths Menace
Okay, snuggle down tight, little ones. Let me tell you a tale about a very cheeky and magnificently fluffy cat who became convinced his human was trapped in an endless cycle of academic disaster.
For three nights running, Mrs Higgins had been talking in her sleep.
The first night, Reza Shadey barely stirred.
The second night, he opened one emerald eye.
By the third night, he was in full investigative mode, his tail twitching like a malfunctioning spreadsheet.
Reza lay on his velvet cushion beneath the radiator, ears pricked.
"Oh dear... I haven't revised..."
A pause.
"Everyone else has finished..."
Another pause.
"I'm going to fail..."
Ping.
Reza's eyes snapped open.
To an ordinary cat, this was just a bad dream.
To Reza Shadey, management consultant extraordinaire, this was a critical systems failure with escalating performance concerns.
He sat bolt upright.
"The Chief Human Officer is trapped in an unauthorised quarterly review cycle", he whispered gravely. "This has breached acceptable governance parameters."
Mrs Higgins turned over and muttered something about quadratic equations.
Reza gasped.
Mathematics.
The language of metrics.
The situation was worse than he'd feared.
There was only one solution.
An emergency board meeting.
With great urgency, Reza slipped through the cat flap into the moonlit gardens of Catford. He lifted his head and released a commanding yowl.
"Mrrrraaaaaaaoooooow!"
A security light clicked on.
A fox looked personally offended.
Several pigeons reconsidered their entire life choices.
Within minutes, the team assembled.
Penelope arrived first.
Ginger Tom followed, yawning so widely that his face briefly resembled an orange tunnel.
Tiger arrived last, overshot the fence, landed in a flowerbed, and emerged with a daisy stuck jauntily behind one ear.
"Night mission?" he whispered excitedly. "The vibes are absolutely elite."
"We have a crisis", Reza announced.
"The human?" asked Penelope.
"The human."
Tom scratched an ear.
"What's she done?"
"Nothing. That's the problem."
The three cats exchanged glances.
Reza lowered his voice.
"For three consecutive nights she has reported failure in a mathematics-based performance assessment."
Tom blinked.
"Didn't she finish school about fifty years ago?"
"Exactly!" said Reza.
Tiger's eyes widened.
"No way."
"Yes way."
Tiger shook his head slowly.
"That's actually kind of mid."
Nobody was entirely sure what this meant.
Reza nodded as though it were a profound observation.
"This is not a dream", he continued. "This is an operational bottleneck."
Tiger raised a paw.
"What if we fight the maths?"
Reza stared at him.
Then he nodded with deep approval.
"Finally. A solutions-oriented mindset."
They slipped back inside.
Mrs Higgins slept on, completely unaware that four cats had launched a strategic intervention on her behalf.
Reza paced the study, hunting for clues.
Pens.
Paper.
An expired garden compost voucher.
Then...
Jackpot.
A crumpled receipt beside the wastepaper basket.
His eyes widened.
Numbers.
Columns.
Data.
Metrics.
Knowledge.
The receipt read:
1 x Bread - £1.20
1 x Milk - £0.90
2 x Tuna Pâté (Premium) - £4.00
Total: £6.10
"This", Reza whispered reverently, "is advanced mathematics."
Penelope peered at it.
"It appears to be shopping."
"Precisely."
Tom squinted.
"It appears to be bread."
"Look deeper."
Tiger studied it carefully.
"It appears to be tuna."
Reza nodded.
"The tuna is clearly a worked example."
Before anyone could protest, Reza marched into the bedroom with the receipt held proudly in his teeth.
Mrs Higgins was tossing gently.
"Oh no... I've forgotten everything..."
Reza leapt onto the bed - fwump! - and climbed the duvet with the determination of a consultant approaching a flip chart.
With great ceremony, he placed the receipt squarely on her forehead.
Pap.
"Knowledge transfer complete."
Nothing happened.
Reza frowned.
This was troubling.
Perhaps additional resources were required.
He lowered his extremely fluffy and surprisingly heavy self onto Mrs Higgins's chest and activated Maximum Purr.
Brrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Slowly, Mrs Higgins stopped tossing.
The exam hall faded.
The panic faded.
The impossible equations faded.
There was only warmth.
And softness.
And the familiar rumble of her beloved cat.
Reza glanced over his shoulder.
"Support team", he whispered. "Deploy."
Penelope sighed and jumped lightly onto the foot of the bed.
Tom settled near the pillow.
Tiger launched himself aboard like a furry cannonball.
The mattress bounced.
Mrs Higgins stirred.
"The stakeholder is responding", whispered Reza.
Tiger's eyes lit up.
"The metrics are metric-ing!"
"Excellent", whispered Reza.
Tiger crouched.
Penelope narrowed her eyes.
"Don't."
Tiger bounced.
Boing.
Mrs Higgins's eyes flew open.
Reza sat up proudly.
"Excellent", he announced. "Full consciousness restored."
Reality flickered back into place.
A bedroom.
Four cats.
A grocery receipt balanced on her nose.
"Oh goodness."
She lifted the receipt and peered at Reza.
"What's this, you silly sausage?"
Reza purred louder.
Mrs Higgins laughed softly and scratched behind his ears.
For a moment, even Reza forgot about audits and performance metrics.
He leaned into the scratch.
Just a little.
"I was having that silly dream again", she said. "The one where I've forgotten to take an exam."
She shook her head and smiled.
"Funny, isn't it? You leave school decades ago and your brain still decides you've forgotten your homework."
Reza listened carefully.
Classic leadership minimisation, he noted.
In the doorway, Penelope smiled.
Tom shrugged.
Tiger gave an enthusiastic double thumbs-up.
Mrs Higgins settled back beneath the duvet.
Within minutes, she was asleep once more.
The receipt drifted gently to the floor.
The room grew quiet.
Reza sat proudly beside the pillow, tail twitching with satisfaction.
"A complete success", he thought.
"The mathematical intelligence package was delivered precisely on schedule."
He glanced at the sleeping Mrs Higgins.
"The recurring audit cycle has been disrupted."
His chest puffed out.
"Stakeholder confidence metrics remain exceptionally strong."
Then he curled into a perfect fluffy circle and closed his eyes.
Not because of the cuddle, obviously.
Certainly not because Mrs Higgins loved him.
It was simply the satisfaction of excellent management.
Obviously.
And beneath the quiet moon of Catford, Reza Shadey drifted back to sleep, secure in the knowledge that he had once again saved the organisation without learning a single thing.
A very important message from Mrs Higgins: Sometimes our brains bring old worries back while we're asleep, even worries from many years ago. Dreams can feel very real at the time, but they're only dreams. If a bad dream is bothering you, talk to a grown-up about it in the morning. Once we share a worry, it often feels much smaller.
Night night. Sleep tight.