the great saturday night swindle

so here's my other bird story. when i was hired at my current job, one of the things that i noticed and talked about the first day was a bird that was flying around inside one of the enclosed concourses. they told me that the bird had been inside for over a year and that it had gotten trapped indoors when one of the shoeshine men had propped open the automatic doors. it was a sparrow, small, and seemed to be fairly well adjusted to so many people being around. i'd see it fly through and swoop down wherever people had been eating and left things behind.
it really bothered me that it was trapped and i worried about it. i should say that i'm really sensitive about animals. i don't even have conventional nightmares about being chased or monsters or that sort of thing. my nightmares always involve hurt animals or someone hurting animals, which literally usually hurls me out of bed.
so, one day i heard the bird singing at work and followed the sound. the sparrow was sitting in one of the overhead skylights, in the sun and i could see overhead that there were birds flying back and forth, wheeling about in the sky. the sparrow was singing to them but trapped beneath the glass. okay....nightmare time. i'd wake up in the middle of the night, thinking about that trapped bird and feeling horrible, plotting ways to disable the automatic doors so it might get free, thinking of wildlife places i could call and complain to, etc but mainly, just really feeling like shit because of that bird.
well....one day a woman comes into the store and says "did you know that there's a bird trapped in your window?". long story short, after maneuvering the displays and having help from a co-worker....I CAUGHT THE BIRD!!! i took it out to the lobby, had the service people open the doors for me and freed it. i felt so wonderful, thinking that if i didn't accomplish anything else, i'd freed that bird. it was almost spiritual, feeling i'd been in the right place at the right time and had managed to set it free.
until the next day. i went back to work and the bird was back inside the concourse. it had flown back indoors. subsequently, talking to barry about it, he told me that when he worked at home depot there were birds that had learned to fly under the electric eye of the doors so they could come indoors and peck the bags of birdseed open and eat it. he said there was a whole group of them who did it, flying in and out at will.
the bird is still in the concourse. it flies around, free loading on dropped crumbs and flying in and out of the food places, gorging on free food with no predators to worry it, in a climate controlled environment.
there are all sorts of philisophical and spiritual conclusions i could draw here. i'd rather not think about it.