Finally, one of Earth’s great mysteries has been solved. For decades, Garfield phones, sometimes dismembered into their constituent Cheeto-colored parts, have been washing up on the French beaches of Brittany without much explanation, like cheerful plastic metonyms of the anthropocene. Now, according to the BBC, their source has been found: a shipping container that wound up in “a secluded sea cave accessible only at low tide.”
French beach-cleaning teams had made the téléphone Garfield central to their campaign to clean up local beaches, which apparently drew the attention of a farmer who’d remembered how they started appearing after a storm in the 1980s (how cinematic!). “We found a container aground in a fissure. It was open. Many of the things were gone, but there was a stock of phones,” he told Franceinfo.
You can watch a bunch of French people talking very seriously about the orange phones in the clip above, and should it inspire you to desire your own téléphone Garfield, you can still buy one online. Just be wary that your local beaches may also be cursed by the Plague of the Garfield Phone, which is invoked from the heavens whenever you forget to leave out a piece of lasanga for our great, angry, orange cat god above, Monday-less be his name.
