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The RN24 Giant Bear Incident: Eight-foot-tall teddy twins appear in our office, steal our hearts

Evie Nyan Nov 20, 2015
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Working at RocketNews24 sort of desensitizes you to craziness, but even we were surprised when we found out our two new coworkers are gigantic eight-foot-tall teddy bears. Things just got weirder as we heard the story of how they found their way to our office, but hey, it’s not like we mind having two new cuddly heartthrobs to share our workspace with!

We RocketNews24 English writers are pretty much used to the zany antics of our Japanese coworkers by now. Those fun-loving fellows are always cooking up something kooky. In fact, it seems like every time we roll up to the office, there’s some kind of madcap mania going on somewhere. But this week’s BOGOF Bear Incident actually managed to render us momentarily speechless.

“Hey, what’s with the giant bears?” we asked upon being greeted by the gigantic plushy pair sprawled drunkenly across approximately half the office space, only to receive the cryptic response “We only meant to order one!”

It turns out that an embarrassing little online shopping snafu resulted in an accidentally duplicated order – instead of the solitary giant bear that was craved, we actually got a two-for-one deal! Buy One, Get One Free giant, eight-foot-tall plushy bears? Now who could possibly get mad at that? Naturally, we quickly took the bear pair into our hearts, welcoming them warmly into the RN24 office life. And of course, these burly bears were a massive hit with the ladies, too.

First, let’s check out this video of some of the writers from the Japanese side of our site unpacking the two vacuum-sealed teds. It’s almost impossible to imagine how such gigantic mountains of fluffy, plushy bear flesh ever made it up the stairs to our office. Observe as the overgrown grizzly twosome emerges from their plastic cocoons! It’s positively hypnotic!

We can’t decide what the best part of that video is, Mr. Sato’s grin of pure joy at 2:35, or right at the end when everyone goes back to work like there hasn’t just been an epic bear birth right on the floor of the office (by the way, have you checked out the first episode of Ask Mr. Sato yet?).

▼ Newborn bears, ready to start a new life as our squishy office companions

How did these eight-foot- (250-centimeter-) tall bears appear in the office in the first place? It’s kind of a long story, but it started when our Japanese reporter Yoshio wanted to buy a present for an old school buddy who had recently achieved the dual life accomplishments of buying a house and having a kid.

After being so impressed with the photos of the monstrous bear his exasperated friend sent over, Yoshio decided to get one for the office, too — ‘one’ being the operative word here. Due to some kind of online mixup, we ended up with not one but two of these gargantuan, space-invading teddies!

▼ Mr. Sato could bearly contain his excitement when the bears were unpacked.

▼ They may be cute, but these bears are real slackers. In fact, all they do is nap in their chairs all day while the rest of us are hard at work! Rude.

▼ Offerings of Japanese convenience store bento were made to our new bear overlords, but they said: “If it ain’t honey, we ain’t hungry!” There’s gratitude for you…

Far from being inconvenienced by the unexpected addition to the office, however, the other writers were totally charmed and the two bears soon found themselves getting ALL kinds of attention. Just take a look and see what we mean!

▼ Each bear is practically double the height of Meg!

We reckon the bears would make a great comfy sofa for taking workplace naps on. After all, it’s hard work coming up with hilarious and informative articles every day. Sometimes we can hardly bear the strain of it all…

▼ Double the bears means double the love!

Since it looks like the bears aren’t going anywhere soon (mostly because nobody really knows what exactly Yoshio plans to do with them), we’d now we’d like to ask our good readers one very, very important question!

Any ideas what we should name these bears?! Answers in the comments section, please!