Making sure you get your Secret Santa recipient something they actually want can be hard work, but Bill Gates has just made it look like the easiest thing in the world.
The co-founder of Microsoft has been known to participate in the Reddit gift exchange before, and this year Megan Cummins was the lucky recipient of his Christmas generosity.
“I’ve done the Reddit gift exchange for years now,” Megan wrote on Reddit.
“I always check out the Bill Gates post and laugh at how crazy it must have been for that person, never for a second even considering it a possibility for me.”
Megan had written about her fondness for cats in her gift exchange form, and Gates had obviously taken note. Among other things, he sent Megan a number of cat-related items including a giant Pusheen toy (a cartoon cat you might have seen online), a cat ornament, a snow globe, a book on cat shelters, and a Doctor Who cardboard Tardis.
He also made three donations of 250 dollars (£190) to three of Megan’s favourite cat shelters: The Friends of Felines Rescue Center, The Stray Cat Alliance, and Town Cats.
“I could fit about 5 of me in the box I got,” Megan wrote. “I figured it was some cat tower from Amazon prime – right? I mean – what else.. a gigantic cat? Let’s be serious.”
She continued: “As Pusheen was being released from his box, I picked up a letter with a picture, and thought it was SUPER weird that someone was so obsessed with Bill Gates as to send me a photo of him. Then I just caught fragments of the letter all at once “a donation has been made” “bill gates”, and my cat’s names. It clicked and I started to burst out loud laughing and crying simultaneously.”
Gates sent many other gifts, both cat-related and otherwise, to Megan, who explained her love of cats in her post.
“My life goal is to fully fund a no-kill cat shelter one day and reform the U.S. shelter system to be entirely no-kill,” she wrote. “Cats are my thing. My life-force, my happiness. However you want to put it.”
Megan thanked Gates in a YouTube video, and added at the end of her post that perhaps the most amusing part of the gift was imagining Gates completing it.
“The best part? Well, second to the donations and gigantic Pusheen,” she wrote. “Knowing that at some point during my workweek, I was drinking coffee, writing a boring email, and Bill Gates was somewhere having a professional photo taken with a jumbo Pusheen and writing me notes about cats.”
