Google loans colorful, distinctly made bicycles to its employees for personal use, and somebody is throwing those bikes into Stevens Creek in Mountain View in mass numbers. At one point, there were upward of a dozen bikes in the creek, with some of them showing signs of long-term weather wear and other indications that they had been there a while. Google has been made aware of the issue, but according to local news outlet The Mountain View Voice, Google has yet to actually recover the bikes. Instead, the company has stated that it will step up enforcement to ensure that bikes are not taken by unauthorized personnel, and that the bikes that are taken eventually make their way back to their home at the Googleplex. The company has stated that extra measures such as equipping the bikes with GPS trackers are being considered.
For the time being, neighborhood association Friends of the Stevens Creek Trail are working on recovering the abandoned bikes. Google does have dedicated staff who roam the Googleplex campus and nearby areas looking for lost bikes, but this crew apparently has not dropped by Stevens Creek. There are sternly-worded warning signs and the phone number for Google Security near the bikes at their normal resting place to prevent exactly this sort of thing from happening, as well as channels for the public to contact Google about stray bikes. Google said that the company has had issues with stolen bikes and bikes being left where they shouldn’t be before, but never anything of this sort happening.
At this time, there is no announcement of any investigation into the matter. Being a company of its size, it’s quite obvious that Google would have a lot of enemies large and small, but a crime like this is a strange way of showing malice toward the company, to say the least. The motive could, of course, be a simple prank with no malice behind it. The sheer absurdity of multiple colorful bicycles stacked on top of each other in a creek simply cannot be ignored, though it certainly hasn’t struck local residents or Google as funny or thoughtful.
