Wanted: Robot-Dog Walkers. $20/Hour.
No pooper scooper required.
Earlier this month, a San Francisco start-up posted a strange job opportunity. It was hiring people to walk robot dogs. No experience necessary. Obviously.
Walking a robot dog paid around the same hourly rate as that for the flesh-and-blood variety, but the robot dog required more time wandering the city’s sidewalks to do its business. Four to six hours of perambulation were required, said the ad.
So much for robots making our lives easier.
On the positive side, there was no need to clean up after the robot, or to pretend you did not see the deposit it left behind on someone’s yard.
On the negative side, the robots could prove as stubborn as their living counterparts. Just as a normal dog might suddenly plop down and refuse to budge in the middle of a busy street, the robot dogs, too, might give up mid-walk — because their equipment overheated. Robot dog walkers would then need to carry the mechanical quadrupeds back to the start-up’s office. Applicants, the ad warned, must be comfortable “safely handling equipment weighing about 33 pounds.”
The ad, which has since been deleted, offered $20 an hour and was posted to the Facebook group “Bay Area Jobs” by the start-up, called Dimensional, which is based, appropriately, in a San Francisco neighborhood called Dogpatch. It spurred only a couple of comments, none of which acknowledged its strangeness. “My son is interested,” one mother wrote. “Can start right away.” (Her son did not ultimately follow through, she told me.)
