An Open Letter to the File Not Found Squirrel

Dear File Not Found Squirrel,

I love you.

I love you because you are so adorable, and so pathetic, and because your entire existence is predicated upon failure and lack. I have a soft spot for this particular combination.

Your whole job is to act as a stand-in for whatever people can’t find. I encountered you while looking for the Career Services website this morning. I wanted to point my business writing students toward all the available resources, but now they’ll just remain clueless and stuck, like you, File Not Found Squirrel.

Which seems unfair. It’s true that you’re kind of a wreck and don’t have your life together. You lost your acorns, your paws are cold, you have snow on your face. But I get you, FNFS. I, too, sometimes stand helplessly in the snow when I should be strategizing some way out of my current predicament.

You were just having a bad day. You didn’t mean for anyone to immortalize you as some sort of symbolic representation of the limitations of university IT budgets or the head-spinning rapidity with which we need to update the website.

For what it’s worth, finding you online brings me so much joy that I generally completely forget about whatever I was looking for. I’d much rather see you than some list of clickable links about resume proofreading services or how to create a LinkedIn profile. I’d take you over a killer LinkedIn profile any day, FNFS.

In fact, I’ve decided to adopt you as a metaphor for my entire life. Whenever I can’t find something that I’m looking for, rather than get frustrated and give up, I will continue to search because I now know that even complete failure to connect can sometimes lead us to something better than what we originally sought; sometimes it leads to you, File Not Found Squirrel.

And when my paws get cold and I lose all my food and I look sort of silly, I’m going to remind myself that rather than being some schmuck who can’t get it together, I could be the consolation prize for a Web-search-gone-wrong and make someone’s whole day.

Thank you for being here, File Not Found Squirrel. Please stay here, buried in the html and the chaos, for as long as I work here.

Again, I love you.