And we know that employees weren’t happy about being called back to the bedbug infested office because that’s what leads to incidents like this leaking to journalists.
WIRED – Zoë Schiffer Oct 20, 2025 2:42 PM Google Has a Bedbug Infestation in Its New York Offices Employees at the company’s Chelsea campus were told to stay home after exterminators found “credible evidence” of an infestation. Google employees working at the company’s Chelsea campus in New York City received a notice on Sunday alerting them to a possible bedbug outbreak at the office. Exterminators arrived at the scene with a sniffer dog “and found credible evidence of their presence,” according to an email obtained by WIRED. The email was sent to all Google employees in New York on behalf of the company’s environmental, health, and safety team. Employees were told to avoid the office until the treatment was complete. On Monday morning, they were allowed to return. Google is performing additional inspections at other Google campuses in New York, including buildings at the company’s Hudson Square campus, “out of an abundance of caution,” the email says.
And of course they claim doing anything at all is “out of an abundance of caution” which is, at this point, I think a good example of a thought terminating cliche.
Elite Panic. Big shots have different goals than the rest of us. Politicians should be representatives, businesses shouldn’t lead, even billionaires can’t seem to buy common sense, and tech won’t save us. Chloe Humbert Jul 13, 2023 At the start of the pandemic I remember people in charge – government officials and such – they kept saying the phrase “in an abundance of caution” – as if to say that they were acting with an amount of caution in excess to what they thought was needed. The worst part was that very often it seemed their “abundance of caution” was clearly wholly inadequate.I think some of us misinterpreted the panic of officials scrambling to quiet possible fear as being a sign that they felt humbly not up to the task. But in retrospect that does not appear to be the case. It appears it was pure elite panic. They just simply feared the public more than the disease. So they were trying to “calm people down” with, essentially, dishonesty. Hospitals becoming overwhelmed or people dying wasn’t what they were worried about the most. They were worried workers would actually get treated humanely with safety measures. Someone in a union told me their employer was busy hedging because protecting worker health & safety might set a precedent going forward, and they didn’t want to risk that. Seems plausible.