Fairy Tale 3 - The Cat who wrote Code

There was once a cat who learned to write code.  He kept quiet about it, of course.  Cats usually do.

The cat would head out to the edge of the forest at night, then sneak back in again through the window of the spare room, the one with the broken latch.  One of the computers was always in sleep mode, and didn’t have a password.  The cat had merely to press the space bar and he was in.

His first few efforts were not especially successful.  Sometimes he would get the syntax wrong and the programme would crash.  Sometimes his paws would hit too many keys at once.  Sometimes the programme simply executed a few lines and began looping forever.  The cat invariably chuckled at this point: he thought that ‘few lines’ sounded a bit like ‘fee lines’, and ‘feline’ is a word humans use to name cats.

Eventually, though, the cat mastered the art of writing code.  Then he began wondering what sort of program he should write.

By ‘program’ of course he meant ‘app’.  He was a bit of an old fashioned cat at heart. 

The cat decided that he wanted to develop an app that would help humans get to sleep.  He had noticed just how often the humans of his acquaintance struggled to get to sleep at night, or woke in the middle of the night to wander about with a cup of cocoa, or complained that they were tired, or wished – often with great wailing and lamentation – that they could catch forty winks of an afternoon.  He felt sure that people would welcome an app that helped them sleep.

He also thought – for he was a canny cat – that an app to help people nap, and an app, at that, written by a cat, was almost too assonant to be true.  He would call it: Cat’n’App.  A cat, and an app, and a ‘cat nap’.  To help you nap.

What’s not to like?

Unfortunately the people running the internet did not like it at all.   The people running the internet hate one thing more than any other, and that is anyone not paying attention to the internet.  Only if people are paying attention – looking, clicking, surfing, buying, clicking, posting, clicking clicking clicking – are the internet people happy.  Anything that stops people paying attention and clicking clicking clicking is something the internet people hate.

And the thing they hate most is when people are asleep.  Almost all of the rest of the time – when people are at work, or when they are in their kitchens, or when they are driving or riding or drinking or kissing – their attention is available.  At those times the internet people can makes noises and colours and all sorts of whizzbangery to capture people’s attention and get them click click clicking.  When people are asleep, however, their attention is not merely elsewhere, it is actually inaccessible.  When people are asleep, they cannot and do not click.

So an app that actually encourages people to go to sleep?  No no no.  No no no no no.

The cat was disappointed, naturally.  For a few nights he stomped around, caterwauling and the like, but soon enough he acknowledged the reality of the situation and began dedicating his nocturnal energies to a novel regime that he entitled ‘sitting on the shed roof having a bit of a think’.

So far no-one has told him to stop, so we must imagine him happy.