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Comment by daveevad | Hacker News Reader

Anyone able to share the definitive history of the polar bears that visited the office?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/Polar_Be...

It had all started a bit earlier with a colleague (I assume that's you up there, jkb79 :) pulling the leg of a guy visiting us from the Bangalore office, about the polar bears roaming the streets of Trondheim. We just thought we'd prank him a bit about having more dangerous animals than they did in India. Nothing too serious.

So a few months later I woke up early one morning and saw it had been snowing all night. I made sure to get over to the office before the traffic started ruining the image of barren, desolate place where you could entertain the idea of polar bears roaming the streets, looking for young, fresh engineering meat.

I took a few photos, walked inside, and got busy looking for photos of polar bears that could fit into this idea of upping the Dangerous Wildlife War between India and the home of the proper vikings.

So I did a little bit of photoshopping, uploaded it to my Flickr account, and sent the link to a few other yahoos around the world. We had a bit of fun with it, but I don't think anyone with access to this worldwide web of information will be too fooled. (It's quite easy to figure out that there are no polar bears on the Norwegian mainland, so I've never been too bothered about leaving it up there.)

You can see the ehm... original at https://www.flickr.com/photos/eirikref/3262204184 for a few of the comments and fun from back then.

Edit: So that's about as definite as you'll ever get it. And I'll never again admit to it being photoshopped in any shape or form ;)

> the Dangerous Wildlife War between India and the home of the proper vikings.

Was there an other side to this war? The most dangerous animal you're likely to come across (realistically, without getting photoshop involved) in an average Indian street would be a monkey. I've also come across many varieties of snakes, from time to time, but they're generally chill and just want to be left alone. The monkeys are ruthless bastards though, not to be trifled with.

Oh, absolutely not. They had no idea, and it wasn't really a thing outside of a few minutes of pranking one engineer visiting us + a bit of photoshopping for fun.

The only ones to ever get in touch about this whole thing was, 1) The Y! corporate blog who wanted us to make a lighthearted a fun write-up about the polar bears, which I cannot seem to find online anymore, and 2) a random local from Trondheim, Norway who sent me quite the angry e-mail telling me that I was single-handedly ruining the tourism business in town with that silly image.

I didn't know about the angry email. That makes the story even more fun.

Stray dogs are a much bigger problem on Indian streets. In 2020 ~6.8 million Indians were bitten by stray dogs and thousands of them die of rabies every year.

Hehe, it was a joke, we don't have polar bears on the mainland of Norway. But, it was fun to show the photo to visitors from different countries. "Be careful when you walk back to the hotel".

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