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Ship blocking Suez Canal prompts flood of memes

Days into the saga, Twitter users decided the vessel blockage was the perfect encapsulation of the past two years.

Suez Canal Lego memes
The Legos rendition of the Suez Canal situation [Via Twitter]
Published On 25 Mar 2021

It was the ship that launched a thousand memes, with social media users sharing viral images of a giant container vessel wedged into the banks of the Suez Canal in Egypt.

The Ever Given first got stuck across the vital shipping route on Tuesday, with Egyptian authorities still desperately trying to shift the 59-metre (193-foot) wide and 400-metre (1,312-foot) long ship.

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Days into the saga, and with no quick solution apparent, Twitter users decided the vessel was the perfect encapsulation of the past two years.

Tapping into the zeitgeist of the past few months, a photograph of a pair of construction workers surveying the ship was captioned “mindfulness” while text above the wedged vessel read: “My anxiety from all the death and COVID.”

Another tweet captioned an image of the Ever Given as “My COVID depression & anxiety” while next to the vessel, a bulldozer dwarfed by the ship was captioned “Going on a daily walk”.

Procrastination was another popular theme.

“Me dutifully chipping away at my tasks,” read one tweet, overlaying an image of the container ship dwarfing a lone digger attempting to dislodge it.

Another image shared was a drawing where the banks of the Suez Canal were tagged as “procrastination”, the canal itself as “workflow”, and the diagonally blocked Ever Given as “me”.

A GIF from the film, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery – where the main character is stuck in a shuttle car reversing back and forth in a narrow tunnel – was captioned with quips about the vessel.

Finally, many online users shared Amazon’s customer review page for the book “How To Avoid Huge Ships”, with one writing: “Hello Suez Canal library, how can I help?”

Source: Al Jazeera and news agencies