- The owner of the
cats holding a Vitamix hostage said she is letting the saga continue for the time being. - Three cats have been rotating who gets to sit atop a Black Friday purchase, which arrived nearly a month ago.
Jessica and Nikii Gerson-Neeves' new Vitamix blender arrived at their home in Victoria, Vancouver, on December 16. They still haven't taken it out of the box.
When it arrived, Jessica told Insider she put the package down on the kitchen floor for a "quick second" and "pretty much instantaneously," her four-and-a-half-year-old cat Max — who she describes as very sweet and very goofy — hopped up on the box.
When she returned to her package, she snapped a picture of the scene in her kitchen. After posting it in a cat group on Facebook, Jessica assumed Max would lose interest by the next day, which is typical of her three cats, she said.
"They check out and investigate things in the house so this isn't abnormal but they generally lose interest pretty quickly," she said.
But the next morning, the Facebook post had blown up, and while Max was off of the blender, her 13-year-old cat Lando Calrissian — who she calls Lando — was sitting on top of it instead.
"To my surprise, we were just flooded with people demanding updates," Jessica said. "Far be it from me to disappoint our audience."
So she kept posting to the thousands of people following along. She even wrote an open letter to Vitamix on Facebook, jokingly asking them to send her three empty boxes so each of her cats could have their own perch. The cats — the third of whom is a 13-year-old named George Destroyer of Worlds — now have their own Facebook page with 34,000 followers, dedicated to posting updates on the hostage situation.
Vitamix obliged, but the boxes came flat-packed and did not have their own internal support system, so the cats cannot sit on top of them without falling through.
"If one of the cats falls through the decoy box, it's over," Jessica said.
Jessica and Nikii have successfully packed one of the decoys full of stuffing, but the cats quickly lost interest, returning to the original box, still packed full with a blender.
The three cats rotate who gets to sit atop the perch, though Jessica said she has caught one smacking another to try to claim the coveted spot more than once.
Jessica told Insider she knows this is not a real hostage situation, nor is it a real problem. She knows she can pick up her cats and rescue her blender at any time.
But in the meantime, she's going to let the saga continue.
"We're not putting a hard and fast end date on this," Jessica told Insider. "Will we be doing this a year from now? No, at some point we are going to get the blender. But at a time when things are so overwhelming and everything is scary, fun and humor are more precious than a blender."
She continued: "This is really speaking to the overwhelming need for things that are joyful. This is whimsical and ridiculous and nothing about it is a real problem."