Somewhere inside a Komatsu excavator at a construction site near Akron, Ohio, in mid-July, a kitten was crying for help — and one very confused work crew had to figure out where the sound was coming from.
Chase Guello, an operating supervisor at River Reach Construction in Barberton, traced the noise to the machine's undercarriage, pulled off a skid plate and found a tiny, terrified kitten who had likely been trapped inside for a day or more in the summer heat, according to The Cool Down. The crew warmed her up, got her checked out through a local rescue group, and gave her a name that stuck: Sue, a nod to the Komatsu machine that nearly became her tomb.
What could have ended as a one-day rescue story instead turned into a full-blown online phenomenon. Photos and videos of Sue — dwarfed by toy excavators, "clocking in" at the office trailer, modeling a miniature safety vest and hard hat sent over by Komatsu itself — have been reposted across social platforms to a combined audience in the tens of millions, according to Dexerto.
Sue now lives with Guello and is being groomed, informally, to become the company's official shop cat once she's old enough to handle a job site full-time. Commenters have taken the joke and run with it, demanding a calendar of Sue posed with different pieces of heavy equipment and needling the company on social media that she was "out of uniform" before her gear arrived.
It is, on its face, a small story: one kitten, one lucky supervisor with good hearing, one excavator that turned out not to be a coffin. But it has tapped into an appetite that shows up online again and again — for a workplace mascot with an origin story, a company that leans into the bit rather than fighting it, and proof that even heavy machinery can have a soft ending. River Reach Construction, a firm few outside the industry had heard of a month ago, now has an audience that almost certainly dwarfs its client list.
