HEREâS 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 youâd get connected to them, so I just launch right into my âHarvard University and NPR blah blah blahâ thing and then thereâs this long pause and I think the personâs hung up even though I didnât hear a click
And then I hear âyou shouldnât be able to call this number.â
So I apologize and go into the preset spiel about because we arenât selling anything, etc. etc. and the answer I get is
âNo, 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.â
I explain that itâs randomly generated and Iâm very sorry for bothering him, and go to hang up. And before I can click terminate, I hear:
âMaâam, this is a matter of national security.â
I accidentally called the director of the FBI.
My job got investigated because a computer randomly spit out a number to the Pentagon.
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 It was a temp gig working their out of date system while they moved over to a new one, since my knowing MS Dos apparently made me qualified.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.Â
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.Â
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. âThis is a holdover from the cold war.â They said. âIt isnât going to come up, but hereâs 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.â
So my third night there, itâs around 2am and thereâs a ringing sound.Â
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 byâŚ
âUh⌠Is Shantavia there?â
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 corporationâs command center in the mid-west United States.
Thereâs another pause, and the guys over in the main data room are cracking up. The overnight site head is saying âI think you have the wrong number, maâam.â and Iâm 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.Â
Every time I try to find this story, I end up having to search google with a variety of terms that Iâm sure have gotten me flagged by some watchlist, so Iâm reblogging it again where I swear Iâve 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. Hereâs 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 wasnât just any number at NORAD. Oh no no no.
Terri remembers her dad had two phones on his desk, including a red one. âOnly a four-star general at the Pentagon and my dad had the number,â she says.
âThis was the â50s, this was the Cold War, and he would have been the first one to know if there was an attack on the United States,â Rick says.
The red phone rang one day in December 1955, and Shoup answered it, Pam says. âAnd then there was a small voice that just asked, âIs this Santa Claus?â â
His children remember Shoup as straight-laced and disciplined, and he was annoyed and upset by the call and thought it was a joke â but then, Terri says, the little voice started crying.
âAnd Dad realized that it wasnât a joke,â her sister says. âSo he talked to him, ho-ho-hoâd and asked if he had been a good boy and, âMay I talk to your mother?â And the mother got on and said, âYou havenât seen the paper yet? Thereâs a phone number to call Santa. Itâs in the Sears ad.â 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.â
âIt got to be a big joke at the command center. You know, âThe old manâs really flipped his lid this time. Weâre answering Santa calls,â â Terri says.
And then, it got better.
âThe airmen had this big glass board with the United States on it and Canada, and when airplanes would come in they would track them,â Pam says.
âAnd Christmas Eve of 1955, when Dad walked in, there was a drawing of a sleigh with eight reindeer coming over the North Pole,â Rick says.
âDad said, âWhat is that?â They say, âColonel, weâre sorry. We were just making a joke. Do you want us to take that down?â Dad looked at it for a while, and next thing you know, Dad had called the radio station and had said, âThis is the commander at the Combat Alert Center, and we have an unidentified flying object. Why, it looks like a sleigh.â Well, the radio stations would call him like every hour and say, âWhereâs Santa now?â â Terri says.
For real.
âAnd later in life he got letters from all over the world, people saying, âThank you, Colonel,â 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,â she says. âYou know, he was an important guy, but this is the thing heâs known for.â
âYeah,â Rick [his son] says, âitâs probably the thing he was proudest of, too.â
So yeah. I think that might be the best wrong number of all time.
Source:Â http://www.npr.org/2014/12/19/371647099/norads-santa-tracker-began-with-a-typo-and-a-good-sport
No okay THAT is adorable and Iâm queueing this for next December.
