The cats of a lesbian couple have taken over the Internet the past few weeks, and it was all due to a Vitamix cardboard box.
Jessica and Nikii Gerson-Neeves of British Columbia, Canada had found out the newly-arrived Vitamix blender they had ordered had been captured by their three cats.
Weeks later, the turf war is still ongoing– the top of the box changing cats 24/7– and all lovingly documented by the couple on social media almost daily.
A lesbian couple and their cats
The couple had ordered the Vitamix blender worth US$450 during Black Friday last December and they were happy when their new order arrived. Unfortunately, they weren’t able to unpack it.
Jessica posted on a Facebook group focusing on cats: “It arrived in the mail on Dec. 16, and I brought it inside and set the box down on the kitchen floor for just a quick second. And that was a month ago.”
Since then, there’s always been one of the three cats sitting atop the box of the Vitamix blender, leaving their owners unable to use the blender.
The three cats are: Max, a tuxedo cat called a “sentient soccer ball”; George, also called “Destroyer of Worlds” as well as “sentient potato”; and Lando Calrissian, the “questionably sentient dust bunny.”
Max was the first to hop on top on the box, which Jessica found cute. So she took a picture and posted it to the online group.
She said: “I posted it with a tongue-in-cheek caption about how this was breaking news, which clearly this was not, and by the next day I think about 10,000 people had interacted with the post.”
Promising to keep people informed, the couple narrated their struggle to keep the cats off the box even as the latter also had changing alliances on who would sit on top.
The story of cats and a box goes viral
With their posting, the cats’ page has exploded from 64 followers to around 25,000 as people followed the story of the cats. Even at night, there’s a cat guarding the box.
“The cats are having a good time, and so many other people are enjoying this as well,” Jessica said. In a phone interview with NPR, she admitted that they could remove the cats at any point.
“Certainly we could relocate them. They don’t weigh a ton. It would be very easy to pick whoever’s on the box up and put them on the floor and open the box,” she said.
“But why would we end something that is bringing us so much laughter? The cats are having a good time, and so many other people are enjoying this as well,” she added.
In another interview with CNN, Jessica, a psychotherapist, noted why the story went viral, “Because everything really is bad, bad, bad and this is something that is ridiculous and funny and very, very low stakes.”
“Like, there’s nothing at all about this that is either bad or sad,” she said.
The lesbian couple asks for Vitamix boxes
To give Vitamix’s social media manager a laugh, Jessica reached out to the company to ask if they could get boxes from them.
They weren’t expecting Vitamix to respond. Fortunately, Vitamix was willing to join the game by mailing the couple three empty “decoy” boxes.
With the three boxes allotted for all their cats, the couple were confident that they can now rescue their blender. However, they found out the cats prefer the “stronger” box with the blender inside.
They were also inundated with comments asking them not to cut the story short. So for now, they’re not filling up the boxes with clothes and other stuff to strengthen them.
“I think in the world that we live in right now, this kind of humor and whimsy is a lot harder to come by than a blender,” she said.
However, once the story ends, their first aim is to make a margarita with their Vitamix. She said, “I think we’ve earned one.”