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posted by Fnord666 on Monday January 08 2018, @06:23AM   Printer-friendly
from the on-the-bicycle-recovery-team dept.

Google provides colorful bicycles for its Mountain View area employees to ride. But hundreds of these bicycles go missing every week, and some have been found tossed in a local creek:

"The disappearances often aren't the work of ordinary thieves, however. Many residents of Mountain View, a city of 80,000 that has effectively become Google's company town, see the employee perk as a community service," the Wall Street Journal reported.

And for the company, here's one Google bike use case that's got to burn a little: 68-year-old Sharon Veach told the newspaper that she sometimes uses one of the bicycles as part of her commute: to the offices of Google's arch foe, Oracle. Google doesn't really want non-Googlers using the bikes, "but it's OK if you do," Veach explained.

Google has hired 30 contractors using five vans to recover lost and stolen bikes, about a third of which are equipped with GPS trackers. The teams carry waders and grappling hooks for pulling bikes out of creeks.

The company can't even confront people who appear to have stolen their bikes:

Ensuring that only company workers are riding the "Gbikes" is not particularly straightforward: some Googlers don't exactly fit the stereotype of the Silicon Valley techie. Company transportation executive Jeral Poskey told the paper he once took action when he saw what appeared to be a homeless woman on a commandeered Google bike. "If I could describe her, you would agree with me," Poskey said. "She looked all panicked, and then she showed me her Google badge."


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 08 2018, @04:50PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 08 2018, @04:50PM (#619570)

    Ok, when someone empties out your bank account and spends every cent - they didn't keep it. What's that?

  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday January 08 2018, @06:39PM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Monday January 08 2018, @06:39PM (#619628)

    That's a stupid analogy because the money is now in the hands of other people, and hard to retrieve.

    A better analogy is someone coming into your unlocked garage, getting in your car that you left the keys in, and driving away, and then parking it three blocks away and leaving it there. Technically, they've "stolen" the car, but they didn't do much with it, but they've caused you a big inconvenience because now you need to go find it and retrieve it. But it's not nearly as bad as if they had taken it to a chop-shop. It is still theft though.

  • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday January 08 2018, @08:02PM

    by tangomargarine (667) on Monday January 08 2018, @08:02PM (#619662)

    Google doesn't really want non-Googlers using the bikes, "but it's OK if you do," Veach explained.

    Plus the whole thing where apparently even Google itself doesn't consider borrowing them without permission to be theft.

    --
    "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"