Bear climbs into truck, casually eats worker’s lunch: ‘Got a new employee’

A bear has gone viral for taking a lunch break in the most unlikely of places.

On June 14, Milinda Stark Scott, owner of family-owned and operated company American Plate Glass, posted a video from a job site in Sunapee, New Hampshire about how they “got a new employee this afternoon” — a visitor of the ursid variety helping itself to a little afternoon snack.

“What do you think is in that truck right now?” employee Curtis Fiedler asks Scott via FaceTime in the video. The camera is trained on the passenger side of a utility truck with its window open where a black bear is gleefully chomping away at something inside the truck.

Fielder and coworkers Charlie Steiner, Joey Carter and Tim Martell stand at a safe distance in surprise as the bear munches and crunches away with a paw casually hanging out the window.

“It’s a freaking black bear, eating Charlie’s nuts in the front seat of the truck,” one of the men says to Scott.

“It climbed through the open window,” says another, before all the men laugh. Scott can be heard over the phone telling someone about the omnivore taking liberties with Steiner’s meal.

“That’s what you get for leaving your cooler open, Charlie,” another voice says.

Employees on the scene told NBC Connecticut they were finishing a job and moving tools when one of them spotted the bear in their vehicle.

“I ran up to find the bear eating nuts,” Carter told NBC Connecticut. “The bear sat there for five to 10 minutes and then grabbed my cooler.”

For Scott, who initially thought the bear was a human in a costume, recalled the shock she felt when she found out the critter was, in fact, real.

“The bear was sitting like a human with his arm out the window,” Scott tells TODAY.com, adding that the bear popped the top off Steiner’s lunchbox like it was on his lunch break. “Charlie just has a giant bag of trail-mix nuts in his lunchbox that he eats daily.”

As for what happened after the video ended, Scott says they all tried — to no avail — to scare the bear away and get it out of the truck.

“One of my other employees, Tim, jumped up on one of our vans — we have a box truck and a van — and he jumped up on the van and just started waving his hands at the bear,” Scott says, adding that the bear wasn’t full from all the nuts, and went from one lunchbox to another. “But the second lunchbox, it’s red and it had a zipper and he couldn’t get it open, and so he got aggravated.”

Scott says the bear then stood up on the windowsill of the truck and blithely jumped out, without a care in the world.

“There was no damage. There were no scratch marks. You would never know other than that the bear ate Charlie’s nuts and we all saw it,” Scott says. “The guys chased him just a little bit and he ran 50 feet away from where they were working, laid down and took a nap.”

After the bear’s nap, it watched the workers for the rest of the afternoon, and in the meantime, Scott and the American Plate Glass team had a little fun on social media with their unique brush with nature.

“Clark’s Trading Post are you missing a Bear? American Plate Glass has hired him for the summer,” Scott joked in a Facebook post. (Clark’s Trading Post is a New Hampshire attraction known for its trained bears.)

Unfortunately for the bear, who American Plate Glass named "Barry," his summer job was very short-lived.

“‘Barry’ the bear has unfortunately been terminated from American Plate Glass Due to: stealing, work out of uniform and having ‘bear’ feet in the glass industry,” American Plate Glass wrote in a Facebook post. “OSHA frowns on these infractions!”

Scott, who used to own the business with her late husband Doug, views the bear encounter through a spiritual lens ahead of Father's Day.

“Nine months from yesterday, my husband passed away on a job site. And it was tragic and horrible and awful,” Scott says.

She says her husband would sit in the passenger seat and would let the other guys drive, typically snacking — not on nuts, but sunflower seeds.

“He would sit in that seat with his arm out that window. And at one point, Charlie is yelling, ‘You’re eating my lunch. What am I going to eat?’ and the bear turns and he looks at Charlie. And I went, ‘Oh, my God. It’s Doug,’” Scott says. “I don’t know how spiritual you are, but I am. And he sends us messages on a regular basis.”

This article was originally published on TODAY.com