A Note From The Future

THE YEAR IS 2025 and after the runaway success of the reality TV show, Gareth Morgan: Cat Hunter, all of the world’s cats have been exported to Australia (the last hold-out for felinekind).
The impact online has been as massive as it was immediate. Saturday has become just another day, even though 4chan and Google+ veterans still talk fondly of Caturday. Treatment for depression – which apparently peaks on the first day of the weekend – has seen shares in pharmaceutical companies manufacturing antidepressants reach new highs. The monorail cat reportedly rode its last rail last week, and now pictures of empty stair bannisters have started to do the rounds online.
YouTube hasn’t emerged unscathed, either. What was once a bustling online service doing a brisk trade in cat videos is now virtually silent. Reports on CNN say tumbleweeds have been seen blowing past YouTube’s offices as they desperately search for a new meme to re-invigorate past glories. So far, their attempts to get a cockerspaniel photo with the words “can haz mutton bone” have fallen flat.
Ironically, the removal of cats from society has had the unexpected bonus of saving the New Zealand government vast sums of money. As people stopped sharing cat pictures and video clips, research firm and VoIP specialists, Biddlecorp, say the amount of bandwidth consumed in New Zealand has plunged to pre-1990 dial-up levels, which saw the government announcing that UFB was to be scrapped as was funding an additional international submarine cable to the US.
Bizarrely, the cat-related carnage hasn’t been totally isolated to the online world, either. Fast food chains Burger Queen and Macbiddles both reported a slump in profits as people stopped buying cheese burgers, and the sharp decrease in demand for cheese has now become sufficiently serious that Fonterra is launching an investigation into why you can’t haz cheezeburger.
Twitter, Google+ and Facebook have also ground to a halt as their users, unable to laugh at the latest cat meme, have begun to migrate away from the services and are actually doing all housework and socialising they missed out on while online. According to the department of statistics, national productivity has increased by several thousand percent.
Sadly for New Zealand (and other countries that have exported their cats to Australia), the real carnage has only just begun, as rodent populations have begun to spiral to alarming levels, decimating food crops and wiping out native bird life. Australia now has the dubious reputation as the only rodent-free place left on earth outside of the Zealandia sanctuary in Wellington. PAT PILCHER