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We’ve been hearing plenty about how Meta’s workforce is in total disarray. But this latest story takes the cake — or acorn, perhaps.
As Wired reports, a squirrel got loose inside one of the company’s buildings in Bangkok, Thailand, after someone received it in the mail. It’s unlikely the creature had plotted to infiltrate the Meta office, but it coincidentally made it just in time to plunder the snacks that executives had vowed to give back to their dispirited employees.
For a long and chaotic twenty minutes, the squirrel wreaked havoc as it bolted around the office before finally being caught, according to the reporting. The bizarro incident had at least one human casualty: a worker who got scratched on the finger by the rodent while trying to capture it.
The rodent may be apprehended, but its exploits will live on infamy. It’s already becoming workplace lore.
New York Times reporter Mike Isaac, who first broke the story, wrote on X that “employees are predictably having a field day with it internally.”
One worker “created an AI-generated video mimicking an HR training course on squirrel-related office best practices,” Isaac said. Another edited a meme of an infamous Facebook safety notification so it read, “Marked Safe From Meta Squirrel Attack Today,” underneath a blue flag icon. For demoralized Meta employees who are reeling from their bosses surveilling their computers to train AI agents, not to mentioning firing thousands of their colleagues, maybe a squirrel attack was a welcome change of pace.
Who sent the squirrel — and why — is unclear. An internal memo obtained by Wired said that the delivery was accepted by an outside janitor, who in the aftermath was written up and vowed to ensure “such an incident does not recur.” The employee who got nicked by the squirrel, meanwhile, was taken to a hospital for treatment. The squirrel’s fate is unknown.
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