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The famed Apple store on 5th Avenue isn't just crawling with thousands of tourists– it's also been crawling with bed bugs for nearly a month, The Post has learned.
This past Friday, after weeks of bed bug sightings, a critter was spotted in the manager's office, sending desperate employees into a frenzy, terrified they'd bring the pest home with them.
"It was just mayhem," an employee told The Post.
"There was a mass exodus... employees were freaking out they felt really unsafe and management kept giving them the runaround."
Staff were ordered to double bag their belongings in plastic while a "bed bug sniffing beagle" came to the store where it was "activated" by two lockers in a staff area.
"I shouldn't have to go to work feeling unsafe and unprotected," one worker told The Post.
"We felt very anxious, used and unimportant, like we were just another number."
One worker said the issue has been going on for "nearly a month" and "Friday was the first day they acknowledged they found something."
The employee said the issue started about three to four weeks ago during the overnight hours at the 24-hour store, which frequently has homeless visitors, when a table on the second floor was "cordoned off" because a bed bug was found, believed to have come from one of the homeless visitors.
The table was left cordoned off while employees and customers were allowed in the store and around the table with no warning of the bed bug threat, an employee said.
"No one could go to that table but it was still on the floor, if a customer leaned on it and they didn't know" a bug could've crawled on them, the worker said.
https://nypost.com/2019/04/15/the-5th-ave-apple-store-has-been-crawling-with-bed-bugs/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 16 2019, @11:25PM (10 children)
The conservatives won't let us!
"More taxes?" they ask.
"YES! How else will we pay for homeless shelters and services?" is the common sense reply.
"TAXES ARE THEFT!" they scream, with the irony of their mugging not hours later by a desperate homeless person sliding right past their conscious thought processes.
I'm sure these same people get angry when they see homeless people begging, trying to wash car windows, or rummaging through garbage to get recyclables.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 16 2019, @11:41PM (2 children)
The various levels of government in the US already collect 6.6 trillion dollars every year[1], and there are about half a million homeless in the US.[2]
If they would just be 1% more efficient they could provide 60 billion dollars per year to the homeless, over $100k per year for each.
I don't think that lack of taxes is the issue.
[1] https://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/current_revenue [usgovernmentrevenue.com]
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_States [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 17 2019, @12:41AM (1 child)
WTF? You want to pay homeless people $100K per year? It's because of nutjob democrats like you that governments are so inefficient.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 17 2019, @12:50AM
I bet you didn't even cry when Notre Dame burned.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 17 2019, @12:45AM (6 children)
Sanfran tried the "just give them fish" method with paying homeless 500/month to help them out. And it resulted in massive influx of homeless they couldn't afford.
My local library is unusable by the tax payers because of bedbug and cum infested chairs. I live in a liberal city that votes liberal and has plenty of money to pay for things like this and yet no amount of spending fixes it.
If you are homeles, you Fucked up. Here are the required steps to be homeless
>burning bridges with your family
>burning bridges with your friends
Random chance can make things worse, but it takes a personal act of burning your bridges to actually put you in that position.
(Score: 3, Informative) by pipedwho on Wednesday April 17 2019, @04:26AM (5 children)
Fail. I do regular volunteer runs with the local MissionBeat to check on and feed homeless people around the city. The vast majority are people with various levels of mental health issues. The few that are out due to domestic violence (indirect effect of mental health of another), bad luck, or the occasional runaway, are generally re-homes pretty quickly. The long term homeless are there due to the societal neglect (and shunning) of mental health disorders.
Yes, there might be irreconcilable bridges burned for a tiny few, but almost all either have no family (that they’ll admit to). Or have a family who wants to look after them, but they don’t want to burden them. These people need help, but cannot or will not ask for it.
Anyone who thinks homeless people are there because of some sort of conscious choice are seriously misinformed.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by krishnoid on Wednesday April 17 2019, @06:02AM (1 child)
R.I.P., MDC.
(Score: 2) by pipedwho on Wednesday April 17 2019, @07:33AM
Indeed
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 17 2019, @09:50AM (2 children)
The mental health issues are why they burn all their bridges. I've had multiple friends "go nuts", it is just impossible to put up with them. They just take, and take, and manipulate, etc and are in general a constant source of stress to everyone around them.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday April 17 2019, @02:24PM (1 child)
I will submit for consideration that if a person becomes homeless, feels abandoned, and thereby loses all sense of self-worth that even the sanest can quite easily develop mental health issues.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pdfernhout on Wednesday April 17 2019, @03:06PM
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34921573-lost-connections [goodreads.com]
"Award-winning journalist Johann Hari suffered from depression since he was a child and started taking antidepressants when he was a teenager. He was told—like his entire generation—that his problem was caused by a chemical imbalance in his brain. As an adult, trained in the social sciences, he began to investigate this question—and he learned that almost everything we have been told about depression and anxiety is wrong.
Across the world, Hari discovered social scientists who were uncovering the real causes—and they are mostly not in our brains, but in the way we live today. Hari’s journey took him from the people living in the tunnels beneath Las Vegas, to an Amish community in Indiana, to an uprising in Berlin—all showing in vivid and dramatic detail these new insights. They lead to solutions radically different from the ones we have been offered up until now.
Just as Chasing the Scream transformed the global debate about addiction, with over twenty million views for his TED talk and the animation based on it, Lost Connections will lead us to a very different debate about depression and anxiety—one that shows how, together, we can end this epidemic."
Although sometimes issues are more complex:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6446928-the-depression-cure [goodreads.com]
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18693771-the-body-keeps-the-score [goodreads.com]
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21413760-the-upward-spiral [goodreads.com]
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep [goodreads.com]
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/134266.Out_of_the_Nightmare [goodreads.com]
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8062873-the-globalization-of-addiction [goodreads.com]
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/617702.In_the_Realm_of_Hungry_Ghosts [goodreads.com]
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34837239-the-whole-foods-diet [goodreads.com]
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/93571.Dark_Nights_of_the_Soul [goodreads.com]
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6905612-supernormal-stimuli [goodreads.com]
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/205000.The_Pleasure_Trap [goodreads.com]
https://depressionanxietyseries.com/lifetimeaccess [depressionanxietyseries.com]
etc.
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.