Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have to say that the problem is accountability. With this Wag incident, it appears the person selected through the platform was not the person who was caring for the pet. When I select someone to care for my pet, I know who they are, and can use my own signals to determine if they’re trustworthy and responsible. Wag doesn’t care, they’re just out to “crush it” (cost of business), and the contractor doesn’t care bec…
It definitely seems they could and need to do more to tighten up the accountability on the platform. No doubt about that. I don't know that it's accurate to say the contractor doesn't care. If they were a psychopath I could agree with that, but most people have had the experience of having either a pet, friend or relative die and know how deeply it affects people emotionally and to know you were responsible for that…
True; nevertheless: good engineering practice dictates that you design a product, service or component in a way that it gracefully fails.
A good example is the regulator for scuba diving (the thing that enables you to breathe and which contains the main valve, through which you breathe and the second stage, referred to as octopus, which is conneted to the bottle and the gauges). Any of those components could fail. The device, however, is designed in a way that if this happens it fails "safely" meaning that it's almost not possible that air flow is completely blocked, but that it flows unrestricted. Meaning you can still breathe, alas for a short time since the bottle empties rapidly and the flow is unrestricted.
This gives you a fighting chance and a way out by signalling the distress to your buddy so you can safely mount to the surface using techniques such as buddy breathing. Training for such emergencies is arguably the most important part of scuba diving training. There's still the possibilty that the thing blocks completely, but that's extremely rare and the base design of this equipment part is done in a way to minimize this possibility. [1]
Another example is a dead man's switch [2]. You don't anticipate that a train conductor is rendered incommunicado by, say, a heart attack. But this fail safe mechanism is nevertheless there in the extremely rare case when it happens. If the switch is not engaged, when it signals the conductor the train is stopped automatically.
I think that when you create something like a dog walking service it's almost rekless not to design your process flows with the consideration that an accident may happen and how to handle it. The question is not if, but when.
Wag's panic mode and the waving around of NDAs signals quite loudly that they obviously never thought about it and thus cannot be trusted to care for your animal. And this is actually the most charitable assessment of how they handled this disaster.
Chances that one of your consignees is hurt or killed are probably much greater than that your regulator malfunctions or that a train conductor is suddenly dropping dead
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diving_regulator#Malfunctions_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man%27s_switch