I don’t spend enough time in the wild to ever have given a thought to bear spray.
Years ago, when I was a camper, I did have an almost close encounter. When camping at some national park or another – was it Yellowstone? Sequoia? – my traveling camper companion Joyce and I went and visited the folks at the next campsite. When we got back to our site – admittedly mildly stoned – we found two bear cubs playing in the well of our tent.
I don’t recommend spending the night trying to catch some sleep in a Karmann Ghia, but it sure beats worrying about getting mauled by a momma bear protecting her kiddos.
There were bear warnings at pretty much every national park where we camped – don’t slather hand cream on before hopping into your sleeping bag; if you cook bacon, leave your cooking clothing at a remove from your campsite; hang your food from a tree limb; something about having your period – and in one park, a site was closed to tent-campers.
Other than that, our only other bear worry was the evening when Joyce and I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of a critter snuffling around the perimeter of our tent. Fee, fie, foe, fum, was there a bar out thar smelling the blood of two camping gurls???
We both lay in our sleeping bags, holding our breath, wondering if this was how the world was going to end. Then the cloud passed by the moon, and in the light of the silvery moon we could see that the critter snuffling around our tent was, in fact, a skunk. (Was this how the world was going to end????)
I no longer camp. So I no longer have the need for bear repellent which, in fact, didn’t even exist during my camping days.
But it does exist and, apparently, has a close to 100% success rate when used against a bear. (It’s some form of extreme pepper spray based on capsaicin, the same ingredient used in a lot of muscle rubs.)
And, apparently, a lot of folks order it online. Excellent stocking stuffer, don’t leave home without it, just what I always wanted, take two they’re small…and all that.
Nothing says online ordering like Amazon, and you can find yourself plenty of bear repellent options there.
Thus, plenty of cans of bear repellent make their way through Amazon warehouses.
Which is mostly okay. Until a robot “working” in an Amazon warehouse - where robots are “learning” to replace those underpaid, over-stressed warehouse workers - punctures a can.
Then all bear repellent hell breaks loose, as happened in New Jersey last week.
In total, 54 workers at the Robbinsville, NJ, facility were exposed to fumes. Bear repellent is made with capsaicin, or chili pepper extract; many of the workers experienced trouble breathing and said their throats and eyes burned. All of the injured workers are expected to be released from hospitals soon if they haven’t been already, according to Rachael Lighty, a spokesperson for Amazon. “The safety of our employees is always our top priority,” she said in a statement. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration says it is conducting an investigation into the incident. (Source: Wired)
I suppose the good news about robots puncturing cannisters of bear repellent is that, at some point, there won’t be any humans to get injured. Maybe it will gum up the innerworkings of the robots, but there’ll be no choking, wheezing, gasping employees loaded into ambulances and rushed to the ER.
Oddly enough, this is not the first time when the words “Amazon” “robot” and “bear repellent” appeared in the same story.
In 2015, the fire department responded to an accident at an Amazon facility in Haslet, Texas, that was caused by a robot running over a can of none other than bear repellent, according to public records unearthed by Jessica Bruder for her book Nomadland, which chronicles the lives of the retail giant’s older, transient workforce.
Yet another bear repellent incident was recorded at an Amazon facility this year, but in that case, it was human error, not a robot-related issue. Someone dropped a can, but no one was injured.
As it turns out, robots aside, Amazon is something of a dangerous place to work.
Lots of accidents occur at Amazon because they have lots of workers. (At some facilities, the company even has medical contractors on site to take care of staff injuries and other health woes.) Accidents at Amazon are, thus, like shootings by postal workers. We hear about them with such frequency because both the USPS and Amazon have huge workforces.
But there’s more to it than that:
Some experts say, however, that Amazon is a particularly dangerous place to work for other reasons. The National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, a labor advocacy group, announced in August that Amazon topped its annual “Dirty Dozen” list highlighting companies that it believes put workers especially at risk because of unsafe labor practices.
Labor practices, I suppose, like pushing their human employees to work at a rate that’s beyond the capacity of most humans to sustain for any period of time without breaking down and/or going postal. Unlike robots. So far.
You have to worry that, as robots get more sentient, some robot might up and grab a can of bear repellent and go after the human manager sitting in the glass-box office observing the robots at work.
At least Amazon doesn’t sell AR-15s, so a robot can’t go on a shoot-em-up spree. Unless the robot figures out how to get to a guns and ammo store, where they’ll sell anything to anybody.
Oh, what a world we live (and work) in.
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