Coffee Break [20/2/23]

Your mid morning pick me up

A zoo in Hitachi, Japan, dressed an employee as a bear for an escaped animal drill.

I’m not sure how effective the emergency training was. Everyone, including the bear, seems fairly unenergetic about the exercise. And there are easier ways to trap a bear. If I’ve learned anything from Saturday morning cartoons, it’s that they love pic-a-nic baskets. A couple of carefully placed decoys, and you’ve got your bear.

I hope your Monday morning isn’t full of booby traps.

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14 Comments

    • Harry & David. How common. When I pop ’round Cressida and Percival’s country estate, Bleckley Hall in Toffington-super-Mare, I always tote along an F&M Burlington Hamper.

      As I write this, no lie, Better Half in on the phone to London and he has it on speaker. His conversation partner has a pure, undiluted Essex accent. If you don’t know what that is, Portia’s sinister boyfriend Jack on “White Lotus Season 2: Funiculì Funinculà” or whatever they called it has one.

      • For further clarification (God I’m bored) an Essex accent in London is kind of what the Long Island accent is to New York. I once saw an interview with my cousin-wife Lady Mary, Michelle Dockery, I think it was “The Graham Norton Show,” and she talked about being from Essex and getting into some acting academy, I think RADA, and everyone had these posh accents and she didn’t really fit in. She changed that soon enough, and she gave the viewing audience an amusing example of what she used to talk like when she was a teenager.

    • But…. that’s Harry & David!!!

       

      HOW is that pic-a-nic basket only $99.00?!?!

      In *this* economy?!

      I’dve figured that little much food from them, *plus* the picnic basket, *and* a whole 750ml bottle of wine would never still just be $99.00, and not like $279.99 *on sale*???

      It’s just wild, that the price of regular groceries has risen to the point where stuff like Harry & Davids’ pricing is starting to seem actually *somewhat* reasonable!🤯🤪😆💖

  1. We have a problem in this state with bears figuring out it is easier to go into a neighborhood to find food than staying in the wild.  When that happens, we have a special Dept. of Fish and Wildlife unit that uses dogs to teach the bears NOT to do this!  It works pretty well and these dogs are amazing!

    • Yes we do! My friend has a house near Cle Elum. It’s a new development which means they cut down a huge chunk of forest to build this somewhat gated community (I think that sucks). All the houses are cookie cutter and are designed with a room off the garage with its own door to the exterior. It’s the garbage bin room to keep the animals out of everyone’s trash and compost. It is left unlocked so that the trash collectors can access the bins. They thought they were being clever in designing the houses that way….but the bear is smarter than your average gated community developer and once it figured out how to open the doors, the community has been littered with garbage nightly. After relocating the bear some 200 miles away, it returned. Now they have to get bear proof door knobs and other deterrents. Personally, I’m routing for the bear whose territory has been fucked with.

      • For sure Cle Elum is bear country & they should rule there.  My friend has a cabin there, can’t imagine high end neighborhoods there.  I guess the whole I-90 corridor will be that way eventually.  My daughter is having to go by there today, I hope this storm holds off until she gets across the pass.

  2. That zoo video looks ridiculous, but it’s a decent example of what emegency planners should be doing whenever there’s something that involves a ton of different parts.

    You have to make sure the people who are supposed to get the nets know where they are, have access to the location and can get the keys.  The people who drive those little trucks have to know how to park to create a barrier and not be wasting time getting out of their cabs to talk to each other in the middle of everything….

    The classic example is Rick Rescorla, who was notorious for calling unscheduled full staff, no exceptions, evacuation drills when he was in charge of security at Morgan Stanley. Execs would grumble about how they didn’t need to practice, and how disruptive they were.

    And then they were able to get all but 13 employees of Morgan Stanley’s 2,700 employees down 44+ flights of stairs and out of the WTC on 9/11. Rescorla didn’t make it because he went back in to look for stragglers.

    • We had that recent experience at work.  Didn’t have a fire drill during the pandemic for 3 years. The first one didn’t go well (I was part of the observation team.)

      The 2nd time went much better.

    • For sure, I was kidding about their lack to f urgency. It would be weird if they were really into it, lol. My daughter has two different friends who are zoo keepers and the attention to detail is intense. For good reason.
      I didn’t know the Rick Rescorla story. There were so many heroes that day.

      • The thing that got me (aside from the lack of *any* sort of hustle, as someone who has to do various drills**) was the part at the beginning, where the net didn’t go down to the ground, and the “bear” just walked up to it, then away…

        An actual bear 100% would have at least sniffed at that gap–if not tried to go through it!🙃

         

        **and as the dork who takes ’em seriously, because I know that they’re for building up our muscle-memory!😉

        Because when you have that adrenaline dump in an *actual* emergency, shit can get missed, and if the emergency we’re facing is a natural disaster or a person with a gun?

         

        Not having good muscle-memory of “what to do *RIGHT now*” really can make it a life-or-death thing😟

        I grew up occasionally being one of “the victims” in drills, because Dad & his brothers were on the Fire Department in our town, and every year there’d be a minor “Disaster Preparedness Drill.”

        The big “county-wide” Mutual Aide drills happened every 3rd or 4th year; they’d take over a school and a few other sites in town, multiple folks were “mass-casualty-event victims,” and there would be a minimum of 3 *simultaneous* “events” happening where fire, police, and first responders from across the county would be tapped in, as each “event” was added into the overall “incident”…

        They always took a full day to carry out (mutual aide was called in from other counties, if there were any *real* events that day!), and they were ALWAYS de-briefed afterward, to determine what went well & what needed changing.

        Then the new disaster plans were written up & occasionally reviewed.

        That was when/where I started learning “muscle memory is important in Emergencies–you NEED to practice *repeatedly,* so that everyone KNOWS what to do, and *anyone* can step in as/if needed!

        Knowing what happened on the Forrestal back in ’67, *and* knowing what happened with Morgan Stanley because of Rescorla’s anal-retentive attention to detail (and more importantly, alllll that practice!😉💖), along with those drills during my childhood, i’m still honestly astounded (and more than a bit frustrated, if I’m honest!), when emergency drills are blown off like they’re “no big deal.”

        Redundancies are vital, and so is practice, so that your body knows what to do in stressful situations, and you don’t just freeze up, panicking!

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