Just under two weeks ago, the LGP office had a visitor.

It seems that she has adopted us, as she spends pretty much all of her time in the office, and is a constant disruption to work. At every opportunity she loves to sit on keyboards – especially when typing is going on, and she is very insistent when she wants some attention, as you can see from the picture above when she decided to sit on my keyboard and demand my time.

I decided we weren’t going to name her until she had stuck around for a couple of weeks, afterall, she could have just wandered off again. But it does seem she is here to stay.

So, we have a few ideas for names, but we can’t quite decide which, if any, of them are right. So, I thought, lets get a bit of community involvement, and set up a name poll.

So, add your votes below, and if you have suggestions for a better name that isn’t on the list, add a comment, an if we like it, we’ll add it to the poll! You can choose multiple answers if you like.

EDIT Oct 8th: Well, the poll has been going for just under 4 days now, and you can’t leave a cat without a name for too long! We will now be taking the top three, Qwerty, Switch, and CatMonster, and over the next week we’ll see which one seems to fit her best. The one that works best, we’ll name her, and update this post with the final result! Thanks everyone for your contribution, and I’m sorry I never got around to adding some of the new suggestions to the poll!

EDIT Oct 16th: After a weeks trialling, one name is clearly a winner based on her personality and attitude and what comes naturally when talking to her. CatMonster! It is great as an all-purpose name that can have its start changed, so when she meows a lot she is a NoiseMonster, when she’s asleep she can sometimes be the SnoozeMonster. And when she sneezed a while ago she was the SnotMonster. All in all, CatMonster wins!

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A bit of explanation as to some of these names…

• CatMonster: A bit like KateMonster from Avenue Q
• Ceefer: Ceefer Cat. Say it aloud, you’ll get it.
• Natasha: The whole Boris and Natasha thing, and she likes eating spiders (Boris the spider). Its a bit convoluted, but made the list
• Piper: She’s a mouser. So from the Pied Piper. Also has a nice link in to the ‘Charmed’ TV show
• Quark: She loves having her ears scratched, so a Ferengi name was needed!
• Qwerty: She is a keyboard cat. Obvious really
• Splodge: I mentioned the new addition to my mother on the phone a week or so ago, and she insisted this be the new name.
• Spot: Another Star Trek reference. Data’s cat.
• Switch: Her favourite place to sit is on the office gigabit switch. Its warm and by the window. Also a Matrix tie-in
• UsrBin: /usr/bin/cat. OK so cat is usually in /bin but you can’t call a cat just Bin