missdecember1988 reblogged
Happy New Year!!!
missdecember1988 reblogged
IRON MAN 3 (2013) dir. Shane Black
missdecember1988 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 It was a temp gig working their out of date system while they moved over to a new one, since my knowing MS Dos apparently made me qualified.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.
missdecember1988 reblogged
Is it just me or does anyone else hate "Everyone should care about disability because disability is the only oppressed group anyone can join at any time?"
People shouldn't reconsider being prejudiced against me because becoming like me is terrifying. People should reconsider being prejudiced against me because I am already a person.
missdecember1988 reblogged
I was thinking recently about how "alt" subcultures are so aestheticized now but they used to be much more about your societal views than the clothes you wore or even the bands you listened to, and my brain connected some dots. Idk if this is anything
Yes, this is it! This is exactly it!!
missdecember1988 reblogged
missdecember1988 reblogged
Kinda in love with the idea that different places on other sides of the world can look so similar. Something something universal human experiences
Like. Kyrgyzstan and Switzerland?
Miami and the Gold Coast (in Aus)
New Zealand and Oregon
The great plains and the Russian steppe
India and fiji
missdecember1988 reblogged
Wow everyone is going through it. Hold my hand
reblog to hold the hand of the person you reblogged from
missdecember1988 reblogged
missdecember1988 reblogged
if you tag me in a chain post and i don't do it it's not because i hate you it's because i am very lazy. i love you thank you for tagging me.
missdecember1988 reblogged
i can't believe you're "supposed" to make eye contact with people. like be serious i don't need to see your soul like that
missdecember1988 reblogged
i don’t care that you’re weird. in fact, i encourage it. hell, I’ll be weird with you, the fuck..
missdecember1988 reblogged
missdecember1988 reblogged
missdecember1988 reblogged
sometimes you just need to succumb to the whimsical urge to sit on an elevated surface high enough that your feet can't touch the ground and kick your legs back and forth aimlessly
missdecember1988 reblogged
Starting a new thread of insane shit I over hear my husband say to our toddler.
- “Here, will this rice cake cracker sate your dark passanger?”
2. “Come now my child.”
*bluey the album starts playing*
3. “Oh I am so sorry. You’ve been mildly inconvenienced. How dare I truly”
4. “It is she! Her Majesty, Queen of the Sludge, Keeper of Goo, DJ Baby P (In the House) Dropper of Beats and Clapper of Hands”
5. He is in charge of bathtime and he lifted the ghoul tonight while singing “come with me and you’ll be in a world of baby sanitation” and I laughed so hard I snorted pasta
6. Okay this is more one that he said to me about the toddler but he was home with her while I was at work and I just got this text
7.
“Happy Independence Day Sweetie! Nationalism is a cancer!”
8. This is another one he said to me about her but still it made me laugh so hard I nearly choked
9.
*Penny babbling in the back seat, many la la las coming from her car seat*
“Are you singing us a song? Ah yes the dulcet tones of goblin”
10.
“Listen kid, I can’t let you have the cup anymore because you keep chugging the bath water, so we just have to remove the cup from the equation.”
11.
*penny is screaming, trying to climb back up a big slide at the playground*
“Someday you’ll learn about ,I don’t know physics and the myth of Sisyphus ,and you’ll start making a lot of connections I think. “
12. *Pen is still screaming and baby cussing about not being able to climb back up the slide*
“The problem is that you set goals for yourself that are unattainable by both man and baby.”
13.
“You can keep the cookie container, I don’t care. What kind of father would I be if I tried to separate a small raccoon child from her trash!?”
14.
*Penny is crying because the bucket she insisted on sitting in fell off the couch with her in it. Husband is bouncing her and rubbing her back after assessing that no physical damage occurred, just a bruised toddler ego*
“Oh my poor sweet angel. She fucked around and found out.”