It’s been in the 20’s here lately. Our January average low is 32. My usual practice is to turn off the heat at night and pile on the blankets. Environmental awareness meets necessity: I’m both cheap and good. Sometimes mornings are very cold – under 50 degrees indoors. The colder it gets, the more likely it is that my cat Otter will burrow under the covers and sleep with me.
Otter is a small, rounded kitty, more like a hoagie roll than a heat vent mogul. With proper motivation he rises to the occasion. On cold mornings when the heat goes on he morphs from baby baguette into super-sized artisan loaf – or perhaps I should say he morphs from witty kitty into loafing artisan.
He knows to nudge aside the little hood thingy that normally directs heat into the room. Then, he can somehow spread his little body to approximate the rectangular shape of a heat vent and then some. And he lounges there, completely covering the heat vent, taking up the Really Important Space as a matter of course, not unlike sites made to take up as much surface area as possible on search result page #1.
See? You knew there was going to be a Search related reference in there somewhere. You were right, but let’s get back to Cat for a moment.
Despite the fact that I am the adult human with the hand that controls the thermostat and the keys to his kingdom, Otter rules one of two heat vents in the room where I spend most of my time.
Upon discovering what he was doing, my first reaction was frustration. My home was not warming up because the heat was not getting through. I like results and I don’t like being cold.
After Otter looked up at me with love on his face I decided that he can get away with heat-hogging, more or less. He has redeeming qualities and I already know that I like him quite a bit.
Also, it helps that I know he likes me for more than my heat vent.
Can the same be said for those made-for-clickthrough pages that loaf about at the top of search results? They sure look like they’re in it to monopolize as much Really Important heat map space as possible. Are they also prepared to love me back? Before I click on them, is it possible to have a sign?
Searchers want love, too. They want results.
Lots of exposure in the top spots increases click-throughs for advertisers, but if the destinations are sites that are trying to make themselves bigger in order to soak up as much click action as possible, might users want to have the same reaction to those sites that I did to my cat? Will they? Can they?
Kitty kitty?
Lessons From Otter the Cat
- I make my own decisions for my own reasons. Your I-don’t-know-why-you-care is my Chosen Perch.
- Though I can entertain myself, not everything makes good Kitty TV.
- Ignore me and nothing else matters.
- Prosperity consciousness uber alles. A full food bowl frees me to fall in love with other things.
- I may not want your lap at this moment, but I do need to know it’s there for me.
Hat tip to Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing