mrsbrightsidehere reblogged
gotinstarblog-deactivated201512
hoodoo-hoodlum
I’m so mad because this worked
help me roger
mrsbrightsidehere reblogged
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 It was a temp gig working their out of date system while they moved over to a new one, since my knowing MS Dos apparently made me qualified.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.
mrsbrightsidehere reblogged
diaryofakanemem
I need this.
Reblogged last year, hoping it comes this year
mrsbrightsidehere reblogged
Anonymous asked:
what is your dream profession?
child of a rich person who doesn’t have to do anything
mrsbrightsidehere reblogged
This is so loud
mrsbrightsidehere reblogged
Good god why is this cracking me up so much
mrsbrightsidehere reblogged
ponyo’s dad has the same gender vibes as howl but like. forty years and two mid-life crises later.
mrsbrightsidehere reblogged
st-pam
Reblogging for the future
mrsbrightsidehere reblogged
The Long Journey II Germany-based photographer Kevin Krautgartner has been fascinated for years by the inconspicuous, often unpaved or only rarely used roads and tracks in some of the most remote places in the world. Roads through lava fields, dried up salt lakes or even wetlands. Roads that only interfere with nature to a limited extent and allow a co-existence of landscape and movement path. Due to the very versatile soil and the mostly immediate surrounding nature, the aerial perspective shows how we have created paths through all kinds of vegetation.
mrsbrightsidehere reblogged
EVERYTIME I SEE THIS POST I’M AFRAID TO SCROLL TO THE END OF IT BECAUSE I ALWAYS THINK BETTY WHITE HAS DIED
Betty White, last of the jedi.
Reblog Jedi Betty for good luck now and forever
mrsbrightsidehere reblogged
Most corporate social media accounts use memes to try and appear hip with the kids so they’ll buy their product but the Sparknotes twitter account is clearly just run by a literature geek who was told they could make memes about old books and is having the time of their life doing just that
mrsbrightsidehere reblogged
mrsbrightsidehere reblogged
wanderinglunarnights-deactivate
mrsbrightsidehere reblogged
Maki Naro @ The Nib
There’s a lot of misinformation going around about the Covid-19 vaccines, so now is a good time to bring this back.
Quick science note: of the Covid vaccines currently approved/pending that I’ve seen, none contain live or weakened viruses.
There’s not a whole virus in this particular vaccine; it’s just a little strip of genetic code that cues your body to make one of the identifying proteins of the COVID-19 virus. Your body uses up all these instructions, produces some marker proteins, realizes these proteins are foreign, and produces immunity against them. So whenever a virus that has this spike protein invades, your body already recognizes it and has a defense prepared.
mrsbrightsidehere reblogged
hausofbhd
britsanity
Witnesses say they asked Britney why she shaved her head and her response was, “I’m tired of plugging things into it. I’m tired of people touching me.”
i can never not reblog this
T-Pain: “That was the most beautiful thing in the world. Do you know why she was shaving her head? Because it was so important to other people. She is like, “Listen. Don’t touch my hair anymore. Stop touching my hair.” People were like, “We’ve got to make your hair before you go outside. You can’t leave.” She went … “Now I don’t have hair. What you going to do?”
The older I get the more her breakdown seems less ‘unbalanced’ and more ‘completely understandable’
saundering
it’s because other people told you she was unbalanced at a point in your life when you didn’t have the life experience or wisdom to understand otherwise