It’s a moment that has managed to wrap Bernie Sanders’s mittens, jokes about poor driving skills and timeless office humor into one.
Initially it was the sheer oddity of a ship being stuck in the Suez Canal, single-handedly snarling global trade in a world already mired in a pandemic, that grabbed the online world’s attention. But it was the photo of a tiny digger working away at its mammoth task that sealed the Ever Given’s fate as the foundation for thousands of relatable memes.
Was the digger — which was trying its hardest to dislodge the vessel despite a titanic size difference — the perfect metaphor for thinking we can make any dent in our to-do lists, finally manage to stop procrastinating or get our thousands of unread emails down to zero?
Was it the visual representation of the scant relief that a walk outdoors can offer from the doom and gloom of a pandemic-gripped world?
Or was it simply us trying to do our best despite the odds?
Perhaps we were just looking for solutions.
Soon, the 1,300-foot Ever Given was so splashed across social media feeds that its many colorful containers and the large white lettering spelling out the name of the company that operates the ship spawned a viral tweet showing people how to “steal his look.”
After becoming the subject of meme after meme this past week, the stuck ship soon cross-pollinated with others of its ilk, including some of Bernie Sanders’s most unforgettable moments.
And it wouldn’t be a fully fledged internet moment without a website built specifically to answer a simple question, which in this case was: Is that ship still stuck?
As of Saturday, the answer was still “Yes.”