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 It was a temp gig working their out of date system while they moved over to a new one, since my knowing MS Dos apparently made me qualified.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.
laterovaries
This will always be my favorite gifset. Ever.
im morally obligated to reblog this every time i see it
Here’s to hoping that every single person with schizophrenia or a schizoaffective disorder or DID or NPD or any other ridiculously demonized mental illnesses has a wonderful day
september is coming up so here’s your yearly reminder to leave billie joe armstrong the fuck alone
Well of course. We don’t wake him up until October 1st.
His dad is dead, just don’t.
In case anyone reading my blog is unaware, this is a reference to the Green Day song titled “Wake Me Up When September Ends” a song that Billie Joe Armstrong wrote following the death of his father in September of 1982 when Billie Joe was ten years old. The title of the song references his desire to sleep through September in an effort to get some emotional distance from the death of his father.
He’s since been open about the emotional difficulty of having written the song since many people now message him on October 1st to ‘wake him up’ despite the song being a memorial to his departed father.
It’s generally seen as respectful to not try to wake him up. Let him sleep and let him remember his father in peace.
reblogging again because the end of September is coming up. leave him alone.
Reblogging as a reminder to leave Billie Joe Armstrong the fuck alone on October 1st and any day after it if your message is going to contain anything to do with “waking” him up because September will be over.
We have to wake up that Green Day dude soon.
your yearly reminder that Wake Me Up When September Ends is a song that Billie Joe Armstrong wrote about the death of his father, and that he’s REPEATEDLY said that he doesn’t want that trauma dragged up and shoved in his face every october. This stopped being funny the moment that he told people to shut the fuck up about it. Leave the Green Day dude alone.
Finally, a hotel that understands color theory
Once again we bring you Tumblr’s One Joke
angelrin89
“You’re not for the streets Pricilla.”
Absolutely
I haven't seen dancing pumpkin guy ONCE this year, are you guys okay?
FINE! I'll do it myself
Why did 12 people reblog this today??? IT IS ONLY AUGUST!!!
Fun Facts About Honey
- Honey is mostly sugar (WoW!) it is 80% sugar and 20% water (double WoW!)
- There are over 20,000 species of bees, but only 4 make HONEY
-Honey is the ONLY food that contains all the substances you need to survive (Including WATER)
-Children under the age of 1 should not eat honey… why? because sometimes it contains bad stuff called botulism and can cause them to get botulism poisoning (that sucks, even infants should taste the deliciousness that is honey)
-Honey will crystallize under optimum temperatures (this has a lot to do with how you store it)
-Bees produce honey to eat during the winter when there are no flowers and no nectar for them.
-A honeybee would only need an ounce of honey to be able to fuel a flight around the world (this makes for a very cultural bee!)
-A typical beehive can make up to 400 pounds of honey a year! (Wowza!)
some-kind-of-bad-pun
This reads like it was written by a bee and I’m 100% here for it
This is singlehandedly THE BEST compliment I have ever received :)
im literally going to kill myself
WHERE'S THAT FUCKING POST ABOUT THIS
I'M GONNA GET YOUR FUCKING ASS, DODGEBALL BOY
confidential to our Tumblr followers, we love you the most.
Reeeeeee, why AREN’T you wearing gloves? Digitization does not obviate physical preservation.
Gloves are not best practice for handling rare books! We follow the guidelines followed also by the Smithsonian Institution and the British Library among many others.
Basically there are very few instances where we might wear gloves, and it would probably be to protect us (in the case of, for example, bindings made with arsenic) and not to protect books.
Photographs and museum artifacts have different rules around gloves! But we only handle books on our channel.
theprofessional-amateur
I made this a few years ago and stand by it
Signed, an archivist
YES THIS!!! I LOVE IT!!!!
There’s also this useful flow chart!
I had to wear gloves exactly one (1) time in library school and it was to handle magnetic tape reels.
it’s clean, dry hands for textiles, too, in my experience. for very similar reasons- gloves can impede fine motor control, which could result in accidental damage. also, touch goes a long way towards identifying blended fabrics or those that might otherwise be uncertain by appearance alone
as someone who seldom works with documents and more often with other collections objects, I’ve really only had to wear gloves when handling metal or leather. and my orgs tend to use nitrile gloves more than cotton, anyway
(interestingly, I’ve been told in the past that photos of me holding certain objects aren’t suitable for our Instagram because I’m not wearing gloves. even when it’s an object for which bare hands are Best Practice, just because the public expects gloves and will freak out. Reality Is Unrealistic.)
Will mickey mouse just be shot dead on sight if he enters the archives or
I misread the flowchart
Eating things you know will upset your tummy later on purpose is actually the thing you need to worry about when you become an adult.
*holding egg up to the light and examining it like it’s a diamond*
If I eat one of these I’ll be fine. If I eat two, I will be in extreme pain later.
Hmmm. I do like eggs though.
*rubs chin thoughtfully* Two eggs it is.
WHY DO PEOPLE DO THIS i say, binging on triscuits
HONESTLY, do people have no care for their bodies, I say as I eat my third bowl of ice cream.
Okay but honestly. Why would you??? I say stuffing my mouth even though im already more than full because everything is just so good.
Look I saw your tags and listen I’m supposed to be on a low fat diet to manage my particular health issues but sometimes it’s been forever since you’ve had sausage and eggs and your animal instincts take over.
As someone on a low fat low fiber diet, I very much relate to this and am horrible about actually following said diet.
dear 18+ discord server owners:
this:
is how you avoid legal liability for anyone lying about their age to access 18+ content within your server. if your channels (and server, if you’re on iOS) are properly marked as 18+, you do not have further legal liability for anyone knowingly lying to gain access to the content in your server.
furthermore, asking for censored versions of someone’s legal documents is incredibly unsafe.
no-one should ever send photos of their legal documents to anyone who has not verified they have received the proper certification and training to handle legal documents, and no-one should ever send those photos over an unverified channel (i.e. discord DMs, twitter DMs, a random person’s texting number).
this applies to censored versions of your legal documents.
there are certain paid courses you can take to prove you are capable of handling sensitive information (a broad classification of personal information that includes photos of legal documents). any company that requires you to upload sensitive information to access their services has internal training policies for any employees handling said information (often making use of those paid courses), and uses specific programs to handle said information without storing it on servers and to limit the possibility of said information being leaked or breached in some way.
if an organization (including an informal one like a discord server) does not have those training programs and does not use those programs to handle your data, they are dangerous and you should not give them your information. if your organization (including an informal one like a discord server) is asking for that sensitive information without staff going through this training and using certified and safe methods of collecting this information, you are creating a dangerous environment. it doesn’t matter how much you trust your mods; legal documentation is a big fucking deal and handling it requires a massive dedication to data security.
if you are really, sincerely worried about facing legal consequences for someone lying about their age via discord’s built-in age verification, to the point that you feel the only way to avoid legal liability is to handle photos of your members’ legal documents, you need to commit to the highest level of data security to run that server.
reblogs are appreciated because honestly the fact that i keep seeing people acting like this is a normal or OK thing to request is insane.
Holy shit, oh my god! 50 of them??
Me when I'm a sexy gay wizard that suddenly realizes they are being followed by 50 rats
OMG LMAO I WOULD NEVER RUN FROM YOU, 50 RATS, I JUST DIDN'T KNOW YOU WERE BEHIND ME
You know what you are so right... We have a bond, these 50 rats and I....