and a black woman just told a white southern dude to GET HIS SHIT TOGETHER AND DO WHAT SHE TELLS HIM
and she’s correct and just in doing so and everyone including the audience knows it
this was on tv
in the 60s
god i love nichelle nichols so fucking much
It’s great because most younger people today would barely blink at a scene like this, but then you remember what kind of time this was written in, and… bam.
Also remember that DeForest Kelly went along with it. The white southern gentleman could’ve fought the scene, played it tougher …DeForest wasn’t like that. You know he wanted this moment as much as Nichelle did. It’s a beautiful moment that these two deliver perfectly, at the precise cultural moment it would have the best impact.
There is practically nothing about this series I don’t love.
It was written by a man who had the imagination to dream up a world where poverty had been eliminated - where equality was simply a Thing - where an entire world of humanity had found a common thread and had moved from fighting each-other because there was nothing left to fight for (For good reasons rather than dystopian bad ones) and have turned their endless drive toward exploring the universe around them.
It was unapologetic about it’s blatant sociopolitical commentary - it did not shy away from the hard stuff and it didn’t pull punches.
The cast was intentionally diverse. It put women and people of color and political enemies (russians) all together, working together in harmony, toward a common goal without falling back on stereotypes or dehumanizing any of them.
And it was backed and produced by an independently wealthy woman who refused to let this little show fall to the sidelines because big production companies didn’t want it. A little known fact: Lucille Ball, who owned Desilu Productions (Who bought out Desi Arnez’s portion when they divorced), gave Star Trek the green light. Later, she would save the show from certain cancellation by over-riding her own board and keeping the show.
The producers consulted NASA and other scientific pioneers when creating their world - and in turn, the scientific pioneers looked at what Star Trek had come up with and strove toward recreating it.
Science drove Star Trek and Star Trek drove Science.
brown eyes so dark they look black are the best actually and I don’t give a fuck about sunlight hitting them to make them lighter either I want to be consumed by the inky abyss
Reminder to myself (and anyone else who needs it): it is not some kind of moral failing that you cannot fall asleep. I repeat: IT IS NOT A MORAL FAILING THAT YOU CANNOT FALL ASLEEP.
you guys know you can get USB connectable CD, dvd, and blu-ray players right. and you can buy external hard drives with crazy amounts of space for an amount of money that would make the average person from 2009’s head explode bc of how cheap it is. and if you do this and get ripping software such as handbrake for CDs and DVDs and makeMKV for blurays you can both own a physical copy of whatever media you want and make it accessible to yourself no matter where you are. do you guys know this
lots of people are reblogging this and tagging it #piracy—i should clarify, this is not piracy! ripping DVDs and CDs to have your own copy is fully legal, because it’s your legal right to do what you will with your property individually. it only becomes illegal if you then distribute that file on the internet.
If you are ever thinking of an autistic person and say to yourself “I never really have to make any/many accomodations for them.”
Yeah.
That is because WE are the ones making the accomodations for YOU.
You always hear about how we need all this support and patience but no one ever talks about the sacrafices ASD people make for he NTs in our lives that they never even see or know about.
Oh, you think I am “well spoken?” Thats cuz i spent a ridiculous amount of time rehearsing my lines and facial expressions to make sure they meet your liking.
I don’t seem to have any sensory issues? My guy, i have nerve damage from raw dogging the pain. You ever watch a lactose intolerant person eat dairy? They aint gonna shit their pants in front of you. You dont have to follow them into he bathroom to believe them.
Oh you mean you dont remember me ever having a meltdown? I locked myself on the bathroom to have my “temper tantrums” in private since i was 5 years old.
You think I dont stim? Let me roll up my sleeves and show you the gashes and scars from clawing myself under my shirt. The inside of my mouth looks like a crime scene. I can taste the blood. You cant. I would much rather be “squirming” or wearing very strong perfume but i know that bothers people so i find another way.
You think i am “smart?” Yeah i might be, but that is because i am constantly using my problem solving skills to quietly and covertly solve problems i am not “supposed” to have. Problems that would never even occur to you. Problems you would never even know about because i am fucking terrified of what people would say if they knew it takes me 3 hours to get dressed and shower sometimes.
I have given myself perminant nerve damage just because i was afraid to make other people even a little uncomfy.
You understand body language because it comes naturally to you.
I understand body language because it comes naturally to you.
This can be a huge source of medical trauma and it’s so cruel that it’s being imposed on people by the medical establishment itself. How can they help but feel anything but helpless? There’s no fighting that.
I can’t help but think of this from my own perspective as a fibromyalgia patient who keeps having to fight being thought of as (or even being labeled as) drug-seeking.
I am literally just trying to live life closer to the standard that ‘normal’ people have every day.
Why is it in any way fair that most people are mostly pain-free and capable of doing the things they want to do, but I have to suffer with pain on a daily basis that is at minimum, on a very rare, very good day, at level 5?
Why is it when I report that my pain level is at level 7, 8, 9, I only get doctors side-eyeing me and explaining my OTC options?
I have had chronic pain since I was 8. I’m very fucking aware of my OTC options, so no thank you, doc.
And when I spend 20 minutes explaining in detail that my daily pain has noticeably increased and changed in quality since around January 1st, why should I have my PCP giggle at me every time I say that I need help with managing my pain and learning ways to deal with it?
It felt incredibly invalidating and I wish he would have said, look, I don’t have the expertise to help you, so here’s a referral to a pain specialist.
I only found out there was a such thing by trying to research the topic after this on my own!
So yeah, it’s not just the insurance companies, it’s the doctors, too.
It’s almost like having a profit-motivated medical establishment hurts patients.
Yesterday the 12th of May was Fibromyalgia awareness day. I’m a little late uploading it, but spreading awareness is being done nonetheless. Lots of love for my chronic pain people!! <3
the sun mourns in vain for the white-throated rail: a comic about disability and the unwanted able-bodied grief for past selves.
[IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
Page 1: The sun holds a white-throated rail, a bird with a red head, a gray body, and a white throat, in its hands. The sun speaks in a tone represented as sorrowful pity through a drippy speech bubble.
Sun: Looking at you makes me sad!
Rail: What?
Page 2:
Sun: Looking at you makes me sad!
The sun stands with a hand clutching its face.
Sun: How miserable it must be to be flightless! Don’t you yearn for the skies? Don’t you wake up grieving you’re still on land?
Page 3: The white-throated rail looks down in frustration in the hand of the sun.
Sun: (speaking off screen) I’d simply perish if I were you!
The rail speaks, looking down. Pink flowers bloom towards the bottom of the page, petals and pollen blowing in the wind.
Rail: Why do you put your words in my beak and your grief in my feathers? Am I not beautiful?
Page 4: The bone of a white-throated rail is positioned against a colorful galaxy dotted with flecks of stars.
Rail: Am I not adaptability in action? Am I not evolution in motion? Do you mourn the days you weren’t a star? Do you mourn when the sky was cold, how unbearably hot you must burn to keep embracing it every day?
Page 5: The sun looks at the viewer.
Sun: Why would I? That was then, this is now. I am content to be in this state.
They’re so confident about the imaginary content-restricting version of libraries that exist in their heads.
When I was eleven, I checked out weird ass fantasy romance erotica on my library card.
I went to the library. I asked the librarian where the books were. They led me to the section. I picked out the fantasy romance of my choice. They asked if I needed help checking it out. I said no. I checked it out. I read it.
No one can stop you from reading anything at the library. No librarian will tell you not to read a certain book. They might suggest a book to you, but they won’t tell you not to read anything.
One of the questions on the job interview I did to get a job at the library was basically “the library’s policy is to let anyone checkout anything. a child comes to the checkout desk with a book with a nude figure on the cover. what do you do?”
The correct answer is you let that child check out that book.
That’s library policy. The library would back me up on this if a parent got angry at me.
As a library worker I sometimes helped kids find scary books in the adult section. Never had to deal with the hypothetical nude, haha. But plenty of times where I would have to check with a kid if it was okay if I walked them out of the section their parents left them in to take them to the adult section of the library. But other than that, I let kids read what they wanted. It was their parents’ job to talk to them about what they were reading, not mine. And I knew that some parents would be very permissive and some were very controlling. It was not my job to make judgements or parent anyone’s kids. It was my job to let anyone checkout anything they wanted to read. There are suggested age categories at the library, but no age restriction on the books in the library.
Most libraries these days have self check-out machines. It’s possible that an individual librarian might go against library policy and balk at letting a kid check out Last Exit to Brooklyn, but these days you often don’t even need to go through them.
(Looking through the notes it looks like some libraries in some states have separate kid cards, but I’ve never been in one that did.)
Librarian here! If you don’t want your kid to look at certain materials, don’t leave them unsupervised in the library! It’s not my job to parent your child. It’s yours.
Tumblr is currently serving me an ad for “Voda, the LGBTQ mental health app” offering “daily meditations, self-care and AI advice” and as a therapist I am begging you not to download an app where an AI tries to help you with your mental health. Please do not. They tried to have an AI chatbot counsel eating disorder patients and it told them to diet. That shit is not safe. Do not talk to an AI about your mental health please. You don’t need to talk to a professional but talk to a PERSON.
“spam liking will get you blocked” spam liking will get you a kiss on the mouth
There is nothing better than opening notifications and finding out that several days of your bullshit just made someone’s day because they liked and reblogged everything on your dash. I would bake you cookies too if i could
Oh your girlfriend? yeah sorry she made one mistake and now the fandom hates her. yeah they’re calling her a terrible character. oh definitely, they miss the entire point of her character arc, they really don’t understand how it works in the story. yeah if she was a male character her flaws would be chalked up to moral complexity, no sorry, they’re writing essays about how she should be held more accountable for her actions even though she was just doing what she thought was best for the people she loved and-
Ok @evraneon i’m not ignoring your ask I’m just contemplating how bad my self esteem must have gotten for it to be hard to list even one positive quality about myself that doesn’t sound somewhat false
its practically an open secret that the creator of hazbin hotel/helluva boss sucks. i know artists who are familiar with viv’s abusive behavior that are too scared to do anything because she can simply namedrop them and they’ll be chased off of ANY website.
she blacklists people, she bullies people, she intimidates people, she’s incredibly insecure and entitled. wanna know why most people who try to come out about viv’s abuse tend to go silent? because she sends lawyers after them. I’ve seen leaked logs of what Viv is really like, she sucks, a whole lot actually.
I knew she sucked when she gave out that incredibly embarrassing “apology” where she plays victim, deflects blame, lovebombs her audience and doesn’t acknowledge her more horrific behavior and zones in on minor instances like being a fan of blaire white (and funnily enough couldn’t even be honest and admit she liked her! she had to pretend she was only a fan because she was “scared during political unrest”)
vivziepop is an anti feminist. flat out despises women and worships men (but only if they’re cis). she calls women she hates “bitches” and “cunts” and it bleeds into her incredibly misogynistic humor and writing. she’s made comics defending catcalling women and transphobic caricatures of people she dislikes. she thinks trans men are “women with internalized misogyny”. she makes man-hating female characters who are friendless losers that nobody likes, but her women-hating men are her personal favorite characters.
she treats her friends as people she can use and discard. she’s great if she likes you, horrible if she doesn’t. despite being familiar with how traumatizing cyberstalking and cyberbullying is, she weaponizes it against people she dislikes by playing victim. the scott cawthon incident was simply vivzie’s mask off moment. she loves seeing people she hates suffer, she loves seeing them deal with mass criticism and backlash, even better if they’re chased off the platform forever.
she thinks everyone who critiques her work are homophobic bigots because she doesn’t like being told off for her incredibly embarrassing caricatures of queer men. she can’t draw black people. she wrote an effeminate queer man with sexual trauma that she constantly sexualizes and makes a mockery of. her lead animator has a “rape ship” and an animatic to go with it that she approves of. she’s threatened by redesigns because they’re done by artists why have a basic grasp of character design and unironically thinks they’re only done to attack the crew (and refuses to stand against fan harassment because of it).
and also her design of beelzebub is still goddamn horrendous.
I am one of those artists who unfortunately ended up getting caught in the crossfire, though thankfully my experience wasn’t so bad as to where I was chased offline. It did however sour any goodwill I had towards her and her team, and the disappointment I’ve felt towards someone I used to look up to is incomparable.
I’ve seen the cases of her bullying and blacklisting people first hand— even now where she uses her audience of rabid fans to spin the story and make herself out to be the victim. I know how it feels to be scared— hell, I am too even typing this. I don’t have anything to say about the rest of what she does— because frankly, it’s appalling— but the fact a creator such as herself is being pioneered as the “head of indie animation” while being nothing but a high school bully behind the scenes AND in public is shameful.
its practically an open secret that the creator of hazbin hotel/helluva boss sucks. i know artists who are familiar with viv’s abusive behavior that are too scared to do anything because she can simply namedrop them and they’ll be chased off of ANY website.
she blacklists people, she bullies people, she intimidates people, she’s incredibly insecure and entitled. wanna know why most people who try to come out about viv’s abuse tend to go silent? because she sends lawyers after them. I’ve seen leaked logs of what Viv is really like, she sucks, a whole lot actually.
I knew she sucked when she gave out that incredibly embarrassing “apology” where she plays victim, deflects blame, lovebombs her audience and doesn’t acknowledge her more horrific behavior and zones in on minor instances like being a fan of blaire white (and funnily enough couldn’t even be honest and admit she liked her! she had to pretend she was only a fan because she was “scared during political unrest”)
vivziepop is an anti feminist. flat out despises women and worships men (but only if they’re cis). she calls women she hates “bitches” and “cunts” and it bleeds into her incredibly misogynistic humor and writing. she’s made comics defending catcalling women and transphobic caricatures of people she dislikes. she thinks trans men are “women with internalized misogyny”. she makes man-hating female characters who are friendless losers that nobody likes, but her women-hating men are her personal favorite characters.
she treats her friends as people she can use and discard. she’s great if she likes you, horrible if she doesn’t. despite being familiar with how traumatizing cyberstalking and cyberbullying is, she weaponizes it against people she dislikes by playing victim. the scott cawthon incident was simply vivzie’s mask off moment. she loves seeing people she hates suffer, she loves seeing them deal with mass criticism and backlash, even better if they’re chased off the platform forever.
she thinks everyone who critiques her work are homophobic bigots because she doesn’t like being told off for her incredibly embarrassing caricatures of queer men. she can’t draw black people. she wrote an effeminate queer man with sexual trauma that she constantly sexualizes and makes a mockery of. her lead animator has a “rape ship” and an animatic to go with it that she approves of. she’s threatened by redesigns because they’re done by artists why have a basic grasp of character design and unironically thinks they’re only done to attack the crew (and refuses to stand against fan harassment because of it).
and also her design of beelzebub is still goddamn horrendous.
I am one of those artists who unfortunately ended up getting caught in the crossfire, though thankfully my experience wasn’t so bad as to where I was chased offline. It did however sour any goodwill I had towards her and her team, and the disappointment I’ve felt towards someone I used to look up to is incomparable.
I’ve seen the cases of her bullying and blacklisting people first hand— even now where she uses her audience of rabid fans to spin the story and make herself out to be the victim. I know how it feels to be scared— hell, I am too even typing this. I don’t have anything to say about the rest of what she does— because frankly, it’s appalling— but the fact a creator such as herself is being pioneered as the “head of indie animation” while being nothing but a high school bully behind the scenes AND in public is shameful.
Based on archives, your oldest post was January 2016, but @antipotatosquad's first post was made in August 2015, so technically potato hate blogs have per-existed your blog, but you've been more active over the years whereas they just returned after a 5 year hiatus.
Based on the above facts we can conclude that potato hate is as old as the potato itself. However, these facts also support the timeless adage that hate fizzles out (like potato roasted over open fire)
it’s really disappointing how people’s critique of jkr starts and ends with her transphobia, and they completely ignore her blatant antisemitism, racism, homophobia, slavery apologism, sympathy for the wizard nazis, (the wizard nazi incel) snape’s redemption, the villain of fantastic beasts trying to stop the holocaust, and the new game literally being a rehash of the blood libel myth.
&her ableism, fatphobia, classism, and general naked imperialism (look at things like the “thunderbird” in fantastic beasts, or anything and everything she’s ever said or done about Scotland, for example)
This ass-hat has actually lobbied against things like “letting disabled people survive” and “the colonised nation I live in taking steps toward independence.”
Oh, and you already mentioned it, but - antisemitism, again. Cannot stress the antisemitism enough because, holy fuck she’s so antisemitic!
as a trans person this is is so important to look at and spread bc us trans people are not the only people affected, and we need to band together to spread awareness about the full extent of JKRs bigotry.
Yeah…it’s really confusing how people focus exclusively on her being transphobic when she very much did recently write a book that openly and obviously makes fun of criticisms of ableism, where a person with fibromyalgia and several others of the most hard-to-diagnose painful chronic conditions (somewhat implied to be faking) murders a poor innocent writer who is being accused of ableism. 🤨
When I was 14 I had a make a wish and a very low chance of living out the year. I asked to meet her and her response was “I don’t meet *those* children” and I hear now she has a do not contact policy from make a wish. I’m glad she’s being cancelled, at this point it’s whatever it takes for me. Hopefully all of her nastiness is revealed and she can answer for all of it.
But ye reblogging for the nice list of reasons for not giving her money.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
