No Sleeping Cats

by The Awl

My first job out of college was at I Can Has Cheezburger, where I was paid ten dollars an hour to format posts in WordPress. That might not seem like a lot, but this was 2009, and adjusted for inflation today, that would be $10.94.

On my first day, I learned two things. One was the company motto: to make people laugh for five minutes a day. The second was Cheezburger’s only rule: No Sleeping Cats.

My boss, Emily, explained that readers might confuse sleeping cats with dead cats, and the last thing we wanted to do was upset our audience with a potentially dead cat.

“Never any sleeping cats?” I asked.

“Never,” Emily said.

“Not even if they’re really cute?”

“Never ever.”

I remember this conversation because it’s funny and kind of peculiar. I also remember it because I saw the exact same conversation re-enacted on screen, three years after I’d left the company, in the opening scene of a comedic faux documentary TV series about Cheezburger that aired on Bravo, called LOLWork. Emily is in the scene, as is the CEO Ben Huh, pacing at a treadmill desk. Aside from them, everyone I’d known and worked with at I Can Has Cheezburger had been replaced by people who were suspiciously good looking. “Just as a general blanket rule, no sleeping cats ever?” asks Paul, the eccentric, bushy-haired content editor who is supposed to be me.

Emily replies, “People don’t come here to see dead cats.”

Read the rest at The Awl.