HERE’S THE THING THOUGH
I used to work for a call center and I was doing a political survey and I called this number that was randomly generated for me and the way our system worked was voice-activated so when the other person said hello you’d get connected to them, so I just launch right into my “Harvard University and NPR blah blah blah” thing and then there’s this long pause and I think the person’s hung up even though I didn’t hear a click
And then I hear “you shouldn’t be able to call this number.”
So I apologize and go into the preset spiel about because we aren’t selling anything, etc. etc. and the answer I get is
“No, I know that. What I mean is that it should be impossible for you to call this number, and I need to know how you got it.”
I explain that it’s randomly generated and I’m very sorry for bothering him, and go to hang up. And before I can click terminate, I hear:
“Ma’am, this is a matter of national security.”
I accidentally called the director of the FBI.
My job got investigated because a computer randomly spit out a number to the Pentagon.
kuroba101
This is my new favourite story.
When I was in college I got a job working for a company that manages major air-travel data. It was a temp gig working their out of date system while they moved over to a new one, since my knowing MS Dos apparently made me qualified.
There was no MS Dos involved. Instead, there was a proprietary type-based OS and an actually-uses-transistors refrigerator-sized computer with switches I had to trip at certain times during the night as I watched the data flow from six pm to six AM on Fridays and weekends. If things got stuck, I reset the server.
The company handled everything from low-end data (hotel and car reservations) to flight plans and tower information. I was weighed every time I came in to make sure it was me. Areas of the building had retina scanners on doors.
During training. they took us through all the procedures. Including the procedures for the red phone. There was, literally, a red phone on the shelf above my desk. “This is a holdover from the cold war.” They said. “It isn’t going to come up, but here’s the deal. In case of nuclear war or other nation-wide disaster, the phone will ring. Pick up the phone, state your name and station, and await instructions. Do whatever you are told.”
So my third night there, it’s around 2am and there’s a ringing sound.
I look up, slowly. The Red phone is ringing.
So I reach out, I pick up the phone. I give my name and station number. And I hear every station head in the building do the exact same. One after another, voices giving names and numbers. Then silence for the space of two breaths. Silence broken by…
“Uh… Is Shantavia there?”
It turns out that every toll free, 1-900 or priority number has a corresponding local number that it routs to at its actual destination. Some poor teenage girl was trying to dial a friend of hers, mixed up the numbers, and got the atomic attack alert line for a major air-travel corporation’s command center in the mid-west United States.
There’s another pause, and the guys over in the main data room are cracking up. The overnight site head is saying “I think you have the wrong number, ma’am.” and I’m standing there having faced the specter of nuclear annihilation before I was old enough to legally drink.
The red phone never rang again while I was there, so the people doing my training were only slightly wrong in their estimation of how often the doomsday phone would ring.
Every time I try to find this story, I end up having to search google with a variety of terms that I’m sure have gotten me flagged by some watchlist, so I’m reblogging it again where I swear I’ve reblogged it before.
But none of these stories even come close to the best one of them all; a wrong number is how the NORAD Santa Tracker got started.
Seriously, this is legit.
In December 1955, Sears decided to run a Santa hotline. Here’s the ad they posted.
Only problem is, they misprinted the number. And the number they printed? It went straight through to fucking NORAD. This was in the middle of the Cold War, when early warning radar was the only thing keeping nuclear annihilation at bay. NORAD was the front line.
And it wasn’t just any number at NORAD. Oh no no no.
Terri remembers her dad had two phones on his desk, including a red one. “Only a four-star general at the Pentagon and my dad had the number,” she says.
“This was the ‘50s, this was the Cold War, and he would have been the first one to know if there was an attack on the United States,” Rick says.
The red phone rang one day in December 1955, and Shoup answered it, Pam says. “And then there was a small voice that just asked, ‘Is this Santa Claus?’ ”
His children remember Shoup as straight-laced and disciplined, and he was annoyed and upset by the call and thought it was a joke — but then, Terri says, the little voice started crying.
“And Dad realized that it wasn’t a joke,” her sister says. “So he talked to him, ho-ho-ho’d and asked if he had been a good boy and, ‘May I talk to your mother?’ And the mother got on and said, ‘You haven’t seen the paper yet? There’s a phone number to call Santa. It’s in the Sears ad.’ Dad looked it up, and there it was, his red phone number. And they had children calling one after another, so he put a couple of airmen on the phones to act like Santa Claus.”
“It got to be a big joke at the command center. You know, ‘The old man’s really flipped his lid this time. We’re answering Santa calls,’ ” Terri says.
And then, it got better.
“The airmen had this big glass board with the United States on it and Canada, and when airplanes would come in they would track them,” Pam says.
“And Christmas Eve of 1955, when Dad walked in, there was a drawing of a sleigh with eight reindeer coming over the North Pole,” Rick says.
“Dad said, ‘What is that?’ They say, ‘Colonel, we’re sorry. We were just making a joke. Do you want us to take that down?’ Dad looked at it for a while, and next thing you know, Dad had called the radio station and had said, ‘This is the commander at the Combat Alert Center, and we have an unidentified flying object. Why, it looks like a sleigh.’ Well, the radio stations would call him like every hour and say, ‘Where’s Santa now?’ ” Terri says.
For real.
“And later in life he got letters from all over the world, people saying, ‘Thank you, Colonel,’ for having, you know, this sense of humor. And in his 90s, he would carry those letters around with him in a briefcase that had a lock on it like it was top-secret information,” she says. “You know, he was an important guy, but this is the thing he’s known for.”
“Yeah,” Rick [his son] says, “it’s probably the thing he was proudest of, too.”
So yeah. I think that might be the best wrong number of all time.
the-noble-scientist
No okay THAT is adorable and I’m queueing this for next December.
I love this so much, I’m gonna start saying “nuts” we need to bring it back
I love b&w proper ladies breaking character with “sonofabitch”
tag yourself I'm "...and we uh need to learn some lines!"
vampireapologist-archive-deacti
people make a lot of touch-starved gay jokes about Lush but the truth is it’s not a gay experience, it’s a human experience. no one is safe, no one is immune.
you walk in there for the first time thinkin’ I’m gonna buy some hand soap today and then some dude who smells like something impossible, like he’s being described by a YA author, he smells like lavender, leather, and the steam coming from hot pavement after a short summer rain,
That guy. He comes up to you and he asks if he can help you sample something. He leads you to a small, metal basin of water. It’s so pastoral, it’s so quaint. You can imagine it sitting beside your bed with a porcelain pitcher in your farm cottage for you to use to wash your face in the morning.
He rolls up your sleeve a bit, and you awkwardly apologize for not doing it yourself, and he says it’s fine.
Sir LeatherRain gently rinses your hand in the warm water, and then he dries it off attentively. Then he massages some of the product into your palm. It’s the cinnamon bean massage bar. He says “don’t you love how it feels warm as you rub it in?”
He’s making more direct eye contact with you than you’ve ever made in your entire life.
As he finishes, a woman who smells like coffee beans and pink-skied winter sunrises approaches and says “oh I LOVE that product.”
You know it’s about the sell. It’s transactional, but you’re in love. You can’t help it.
You’re also More uncomfortable than you’ve ever been in your entire life.
As you walk away to the register, you clench your hand and unclench it like Mr. Darcy when he touches Elizabeth Bennet’s hand to help her out of a coach.
As someone who’s worked at Lush I assure you it’s just as weirdly intimate to be the one rubbing lotions into other people’s skin
vampireapologist
oh thank god
hogwartsaheadcanon
Lush has some bizarro magic going on i once wore a hat i’d knitted into a lush shop and one of the staff members casually complimented it and i went home and i got half way through knitting them one to take into the shop as a gift before i realised how fucking whacked out a thing that would be to do like i was ensorcelled there was spell work upon me
vampireapologist
obsessed with this
Did no one notice he's a wizard
This has to be one of my favorite scenes.
im pretty sure i met an irl disney villain at my job a few weeks ago.
merry and pippin telling how the war goes to their old pal
strudelcreep
i’m reblogging this bc it made me feel things
so march lasted 20 years but april is going to be 3 days
hey. its april 23rd. did u even notice? no? me either
I could cry looking at this
eaglesofsparta
just in case anyone is wondering, this is a town in china called furong zhen, in the hunan province!! it’s so beautiful and like massive
photo by pavel dvorak
Maybe this has been said a lot already but neither republicans nor democrats have done much of anything for most of my entire lifetime to help the poverty, decaying infrastructure, meager health care and failing education in southern and midwestern states but between the two of them the republicans keep securing votes from those areas by catering their flippant lies and false promises directly to those demographics. Nobody is going to defeat the right wing without beating them at that game and to beat them at that game they also have to actually make good on those promises and actually help the people whose living situations look like this:
Courage the Cowardly Dog didn’t make this shit up, WE used to live in what was practically this picture. The only civilization for an hour in any direction had mcdonalds, gas stations, dollar general and an extremely small, extremely pricey grocery store and those were your food choices unless you had a reliable car. Big corporations owned the miles and miles of farmland in all directions, dousing them with pesticides the entire town could smell all day. Inches of dust would cake to everything. Nobody had jobs unless they could afford the hour commute and even then what qualified as “the city” was more like a city’s walking corpse, businesses boarding up and fleeing to the coasts if their land wasn’t just bought up and leveled for more corn production.
There are millions of people stuck living this way and nobody is fucking doing anything about it. Even on this website I see people just laugh about it and dismiss everyone out there as a bunch of white racists, as if their living conditions probably aren’t part of why some of them are so angry and ignorant and willing to vote a complete monster into the white house if he feeds them enough bullshit, as if there aren’t also lots of sweet and well meaning people stuck out there starving, as if there aren’t lots of marginalized people out there who have no support network or transportation or escape route, as if even the racists don’t have little innocent children who don’t know better and need a fucking chance to go to school and eat something other than pepsi and hot dogs if they’re ever going to break the cycle of hate they didn’t ask to be born into.
Hey congrats to those who looked at this and posted literally the exact same black-hearted classism it was decrying and which is fundamentally identical to how Trumpers themselves react to homeless people. Your confidence in your wretchedness is at least technically impressive.
I made a decision to not reblog anybody else in the notes, whichever side they’re on, but multiple people still responded to all this with “why don’t you just move!?!” and when called on it dug their heels in to keep sticking by that suggestion. I’ve deleted almost all of that so I don’t have to look at it anymore, but don’t worry, I literally went into every single one of their DM’s and bitched at them for it so none of y’all have to. Let’s go over what “just moving away” entails:
- Finding a new home for rent in your desired location and sending in an application, which itself often costs $50.
- Having a positive credit score or hoping they’re just kind enough to not care about that.
- Hoping they don’t choose someone else over you and just keep your $50, which is a high possibility because almost every livable home in a coastal city gets multiple applicants the entire time it’s on the market.
- Proving you have and sometimes proving you WILL CONTINUE TO HAVE an income of more than the rent amount. In my area they demand two to three times the total rent amount.
- Having half to all of the first month’s rent and a security deposit to offer up front, which if you’re lucky to find a decomposing slum might cost a bare minimum of $300 in total but is vastly more likely to cost $900 or more.
- Having money to set up the water, electricity and other utilities for that first month if they aren’t included in the rental price.
- Having the money to transport at least yourself. Even if we’re talking just one person with a few belongings by car or by plane that’s also going to be hundreds of dollars.
- Hoping you can somehow secure a job long distance, secure one the very moment you get there, or be allowed to rent that apartment on the *promise* that you’ll find one in time to pay another month’s rent.
- Hoping that the job even pays enough to do that at all.
Of course just to get the fucking job is a competition with potentially dozens of people and its own lengthy process. If you don’t find that miracle home that lets you rent a place jobless, you’re looking at spending more money you don’t have on hotels or living homeless for a while, growing dirtier and sicker and hungrier every day which all makes you look “undesirable” to employers.
So when you say “just move,” you’re telling people who live paycheck-to-paycheck, with maybe $50 “life savings,” to pull more money out of their ass than their entire family has possibly ever seen in one place and gamble it all on the slim hope that every step of this process will succeed without a single unexpected complication because if ANY part of it does, and it is almost certainly going to, then you might just lose even the option to crawl back to the rotten. leaking farmhouse you at least knew was safer than sleeping under a bridge. I live on the edges of one of those coastal, hip liberal cities everybody flees to. We have an overwhelming homeless population. Someone is begging for money at almost every single intersection and parking lot. People sleep in tents in the woods until they give up and die. Thousands of them are people who became desperate enough one day to roll the dice and “jUsT mOvE”
flicker-serthes
Good post OP.
[ID: a bare house in a barren cornfield. It has no paint on it and is a two story Victorian. The windows are dark.]
