Febraury 1, 2022
Jessica Gerson-Neeves and her wife, Nikii, are really looking forward to using their new Vitamix blender to whip up smoothies and soups. In fact, the highly anticipated Black Friday purchase has recently become the focal point of their kitchen at home in British Columbia, Canada.
There’s just one problem: They can’t actually unpack it, reports NPR.
“It arrived in the mail on December 16, and I brought it inside and set the box down on the kitchen floor for just a quick second,” Gerson-Neeves says. “And that was a month ago.”
Gerson-Neeves has posted near-daily updates on the cats’ Facebook page (warning: language), documenting their hilariously formal changing of the guard, ever-shifting alliances, and misadventures.
The posts read like dispatches from the front lines of a high-stakes battle, documenting the trio’s every move and their humans’ unsuccessful attempts to disrupt them.
The cats’ page has grown from 64 followers to some 25,000, as people around the world learn about the story.
Gerson-Neeves stressed in a phone interview with NPR that the cats aren’t literally holding the Vitamix hostage. They could, of course, be hoisted off the box at any point. But she says she and her wife aren’t in a rush to end the stalemate since it’s providing some much-needed levity.
“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,” Gerson-Neeves says. “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. I think we all are very much in need of something that is silly and low stakes right now.”
It all began, Gerson-Neeves says, when Max hopped on the Vitamix box as soon as she put it down on that fateful December day. Like any besotted cat owner, she thought it was adorable and snapped a picture, which she posted to a cat-lovers Facebook group.
“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,” she explains.
She wrote jokingly in the original post that she would provide updates if the standoff continued, and members of the group held her to that promise, even as days turned into weeks.
Gerson-Neeves says she has been particularly moved by the comments that their growing audience leaves on Facebook, both the hilarious and the heartfelt.
Those include people experiencing seasonal depression, exhausted health care workers, and even one woman “who said that her husband had been profoundly depressed for a long time and this was the first time she’d seen him smile in months,” Gerson-Neeves recalls.
“It is silly and ridiculous and very low stakes and not an actual problem and just something that people can laugh at,” she adds. “Everything is so overwhelming and so painful right now that people are desperately in need of things they can just laugh at.”
Research contact: @NPR