In the before times, when I worked in a team in an office1 I went to five days a week, there was a series of in-jokes created through bonding over adversity of deadlines or just riffs off offhand comments. Mr Focus Cat was one of these.
Its application was one of the way blinkers are used on horse-drawn carriages. I'd have it on my screen blocking out all but the document I was working on, as a way of keeping on task. (This was years before I had actual medication to help this process). It was occasionally also on my desktop, used as shorthand for intent.
all very interesting, D, but who the fuck is Mr Focus Cat?
So, to answer that, we've got to go further back. Back to.. hmm, it must have been a slower day - looking through google review photos of some location that we were doing some work for. My boss at the time found an image that stood out from the others: a café shot focused on just some guyTM with intense eye contact to camera; the barest of smiles - just, a look. They became a bit of a meme between us: the file cropped to a headshot, saved as "focus assistance.jpg" and thumbnail stuck to the bottom of my monitor as an aide memoire to get on with things2.
Time passes. A new team member starts, bedding in and getting used to them. It took a few months but we eventually got on like a house on fire. Mr Focus Man comes up at some point in conversation (they were possibly attached to a handover email or something as an Easter egg). "I thought they were your partner or relative or something!" they said, I guess, completely rationally.
Meanwhile, Pallas Cats come up for some reason; presumably because they're glorious. This image is shared. Somehow its grump and imperious stature in the face of the world strikes a chord. They become Mr Focus Cat, saved on the drives in an 'inspiration' collection that grew over the years (often animals with sage advice like an Aesop Fable in impact font), with some later standouts that gained traction ("Save As Man", "Forward Planning Crocodile", "Gone 6 Frog"). A different time; a different world.
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I had to wait until I had been to said office to post this, because it didn't come up on image searches (;_;)
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Deadline-driven heavy workloads vs. (at the time, undiagnosed but very obvious) ADHD
