Orangutans with ape-itude …
There was a cheerful story from the Netherlands this week. Staff of a primate park near the Dutch town of Apeldoorn are showing pictures of potential mates to their adult orangutans to see if they have a preferred choice of partner. Tinder for Apes!
Meantime Chester’s orangutans have become the stars of The Zoo, a TV documentary series that follows the lives of the zoo’s animal collection. Their ability to break out of their compound and go walkabout has been most endearing, but perhaps they’d be better behaved, or at least ‘otherwise occupied’, if the zoo introduced Tinder for Apes for them too:
They get into all sorts of scrapes
When a group of them sometimes escapes.
But a Dutch zoo has found
That they all hang around
When they swipe right on Tinder for Apes!
Postscript: For a while now my place of work has promoted a networking scheme for staff via its so-called ‘Random Coffee’ club. Its aim is to encourage staff to meet colleagues they would not normally bump into. Interested parties put their names forward and random pairings are then drawn to share a coffee break at a mutually agreeable date. Random Coffee is, in fact, a location-based social discovery service that facilitates communication between mutually interested users.
That is all very worthy and innocent, but can you spot the obvious? Let me help. The last sentence of the paragraph above is a truncated version of Wikipedia’s opening paragraph in its entry for Tinder:
Tinder is a location-based dating and social discovery service application (using Facebook) that facilitates communication between mutually interested users, allowing matched users to chat.
Yup! It was not long before Random Coffee became known as the Lab’s version of Tinder. I don’t know who coined it thus or if it has yet led to romance, but it’s given us two limericks for the price of one this week …
I sent out a new memorandum
That staff should now meet up at random.
So forget about Tinder
And let us not hinder
Your efforts to hook-up in tandem.