ediejay:fun-n-fashion:arctic-hands:therobotmonster:kuroba101:prismatic-bell:HERE’S THE THING T

ediejay:fun-n-fashion:arctic-hands:therobotmonster:kuroba101:prismatic-bell:HERE’S THE THING THOUGHI 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 clickAnd 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.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 It was a temp gig working their out of date system while they moved over to a new one, since my knowing MS Dos apparently made me qualified.There was no MS Dos involved.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.This is how the whole Santa Tracker thing got started with NATO. Also reminds me of a story. A dude I once knew has a fancy job in computer security that has him travelling all over the world and one of my favorite stories is how this company (I was not allowed to know the name due to confidentiality clauses but I was assured it was one with strong ties to national security) had a problem where every day their servers would go down at the same time for 15 mins straight and no one could figure out why because everything checked out and it was literally supposed to be impossible for the servers to go down and so they hired him to come have a look at their servers and figure out if they were being hacked or what because according to security logs no one had been in there that shouldn’t be.The security around the server room was ridiculous. Like, he couldn’t even go in the room without the head of security and one of the vice presidents of the company in there with him. He had to pretty much force them to let him put a small camera, encrypted data  streaming to his laptop,  in the server room overnight and then he wasn’t allowed to leave with his laptop. So he goes in and reviews the footage the next day and at the exact time stamp he has for the footage going down he sees…. The cleaning person unplugging the servers so that they can plug in their vacuum. Fifteen minutes later the vacuuming is done and the servers are up and running again. My story is not quite so intense, but still gave me a good laugh.Like @prismatic-bell I worked in a call center for some time. One night, I get a hold of a lady to ask her some questions about her recent car repair. She tells me, “Oh, actually it was my husband who took care of it all because I was out of town. Here, let me give you his desk number, he’ll answer for sure.”And I was all, yeah, sure, great. I take down his number, and I give it a call.“Mission Control, John here.”I totally freeze. “Ahh…John Doe?”“Yes, that’s me. How can I help you?”“I’m just…calling about your recent car repair. Do you…do you have *time* to do a survey?”“Oh yeah, go ahead.”So I am sweating balls the entire time I am talking to him, thinking “Oh shit, what mission control?! WHO GIVES OUT THE DESK NUMBER FOR MISSION CONTROL JUST LIKE THAT?!” and at one point he has to pause talking to me and I hear him talking to a couple of other people in the room, saying shit about “Yeah, we are cleared for that.” and “No worries, I’ve been watching the reports.”After I get off the phone, curiousity got the better of me, and I did a quick investigation into the phone number I called to see where in the country it was.Langley fucking Virginia.And that is the time that I got to call CIA headquarters mission control because a wife was kind enough to give me her husbands desk number. -- source link

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