SteelHouse CEO Mark Douglas argues that business travel will never return to coronavirus levels.
Dozens of people from San Francisco software company Benchling Inc. was reported on a video call with a special guest when the meeting quickly went beyond the text.
Benchling paid Sweet Farm, a 20-acre animal sanctuary, to spice up the virtual gathering with a video feed of animals, including Paco, a 5-foot 5-foot rescue llama. When co-founder Nate Salpeter rose too quickly from the sanctuary, a terrified Paco took revenge by spraying him in the face with a mouthful of spit.
“It took everyone off guard, especially Nate,” said Yujia Zhao, an account manager at Benchling. The call breaks out in laughter.
“They have a fair range on their spit,” said Mr. Salpeter said. “It mostly smells like hay.”
Repeated virtual meetings over the past year have eroded morale in many workplaces. So companies hire four-legged guests – sheep, goats, turtles, llamas, bearded dragons and more – to paint smiles back on the faces of working employees. Hosting video calls for animals has become a lucrative income stream for many farms, shrines or zoos.
The animals do not always play together. Chickens croak over guests, goats nibble on fingers, cows gallop away. So farmers became experts to spoil their talent. They found that they stuffed foals, banned troublemakers, blackmailed them with treats and stomach scratches – all to keep the animals happy and perform at their best.
“We give the hedgehogs baths, which are really cute,” said Chelsea Phillips, founder of Tiny Tails to You. “We have baby shampoo, which is good for them to use, but you also want to follow it up at the end with an olive oil spray, because it can dry out quite easily.”
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Tiny Tails, a virtual zoo in Austin, Texas, offers a full tour – hedgehogs, chinchillas, rabbits, chickens, turtles and more, all competing for attention – with hangouts starting at $ 65. It was a way to earn income to increase when visits stopped last spring.
One of Tiny Tails’ more mischievous animals is Jeffrey the gecko, who, when kept too close to the laptop during calls, jumps on the screen. “He’s a bit of a wildcard,” she said. Phillips said. Now they keep two-year-old Jeffrey far away so he does not fall into the temptation to dive into the technology.
Stephanie Prevost, chief operating officer of Vendr Inc., which helps companies buy and renew software, took her three children for a work social with Tiny Tails.
Things got chaotic when turtle Knuckles Tortellini (13) showed up. “It’s so simple, but the turtle at the end jumped on the table, and the adults and the kids laughed like that,” she said. Prevost said. People still joke about it on Slack.
In response to this, Mrs. Phillips said they are now feeding the animals early to avoid unwanted accidents.
Alison Johnson in Bowbridge Alpacas Scotland in North-East Fife, UK, is constantly chasing her herd. A trained optometrist, Mrs. Johnson, got her first alpacas in 2015. She charges £ 39 ($ 55) for a 30-minute tour and an adoption package.
The six-year-old Balthazar, a Huacaya alpaca with a windswept edge, is the most malicious member of the herd and tends to influence the others. In one conversation with Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., he kept wandering off the camera. Soon enough, the alpacas chase each other around the road. Mrs. Johnson had to rush to the far corner of the field to catch them.
“When she turned around, they wandered to the other side,” said Kirsi Swinton, an executive assistant at Hewlett.
“It keeps me fit and healthy,” she said. Johnson said.
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Saltpeter’s Sweet Farm has more than 150 rescued animals, including pigs, turkeys, cows, chickens, sheep, horses and goats. These days, a ten-minute “Goat-2-Meeting” costs – a pun on GoToMeeting conference software by LogMeIn Inc. – with unlimited guests $ 100, which helps raise money for Sweet Farm and a collection of other zoos. Sweet Farm made more than 8,000 calls.
Goats cannot always be counted on to carry them. Farmer Dot McCarthy used many of them from her approximately 40 herd in Zoom calls to raise more than £ 50,000 ($ 70,000) for her Cronkshaw Fold Farm in Lancashire, England. The money enabled her to hire five new part-time employees. Now she plans to invest in sustainable technologies such as solar panels and electric vehicles.
People can invite goats for five minutes for video calls – and even create personalized messages for the goats to eat with edible paper and ink (£ 10).
The goats had cleared her away several times and chewed the paper before joining the Zoom. “So if we’re too late to call, that’s the reason we had to rewrite the letter,” she said. McCarthy said. It does not get any easier as the cameras roll. The farm uses a smartphone and the goats constantly snack on the biodegradable suitcase. “I think it’s a kind of plant material,” she said.
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