this one time my two friends and i had an english assignment to write an essay about the tragic elements of julius caesar. boring, anyway, yeah, we finish our essays and we’re all hanging out the night before it’s due, and we remember that our teacher actually lives really close to my house??? like a minute walk tops. and one of my friends mentions this girl who used to hand in her assignments in envelopes with a wax seal and left them on the doorstep of her teacher. so in our tired, carbohydrate-addled brains we’re like “that’s a FUCKIGN good idea shit man we have got to fucknig do thta RIGHT NOW”.
so we dig around my jewelry box and find this UGLY ASS owl ring that i had stashed away somewhere and we’re like aw this is fuckin PERFECT. so we print our essays (yes all three, there were t h r e e of us who thought this was a good idea) and tuck them into this official looking manila envelope. we find this red candle and melt it down, right?? problem is, these wax seals that they used to use in medieval times and game of thrones episodes have SPECIAL fuckin wax that is made for that shit. we did not know that…at the time…ok, so we melt this wax and we pour it very carefully on the envelope, but because the envelope is flat on the ground it just runs halfway down the thing, just goes fuckign EVERYWHERE. we don’t give a SHIT, and we press that ugly fuckin owl ring in there. then, one of my friends is like “wow i’m gonna put my finger print in the wax” and then we fucking ALL do it, as if it’s not at all creepy to put your fingerprints in a wax seal that’s supposed to go to your teacher?? we write his last name on the envelope and take it w us, right, okay.
so at ELEVEN AT NIGHT, we walk over to my teacher’s house and the lights are all off and then we realize that this….,.,.is fuckin WEIRD AND CREEPY. yes. only THEN did we realize this. so we end up fuckin around in his driveway for a full five minutes contemplating who is ballsy enough to run up to his doorstep and drop off the envelope cause we weren’t sure if he had a motion activated light or not. then my friend GRABS that envelope and just rips to the door, drops it on the mat, runs back to us, says “go gogogogogogooggo fuckfyck” and we start RUNNING DOWN THE ROAD BACK TO MY HOUSE.
when we get there we realize how fuckin creepy it was, and we start freaking out. like we actually think we could be expelled for this odd shit (we were really tired and freaked out ok shut up) and so we try our best to forget about it and go to sleep. when we wake up, my friend has a text from her mother and it’s just a picture of a text she got from the teacher we submitted our essays to. so we start freaking out until we realize he’s written, “someone’s submitted their essay like a ninja in the night and i think it was your daughter and her two friends.”
so yeah anyway this is the story of how my teacher is the fcukgin coolest for not expelling me for putting a weird sketchy package on his doorstep nice
1. the meaning behind my url 2. a picture of me 3. tattoos i have 4. last time i cried and why 5. piercings i have 6. favorite band 7. biggest turn off(s) 8. top 5 (insert subject) 9. tattoos i want 10. biggest turn on(s) 11. age 12. ideas of a perfect date 13. life goal(s) 14. piercings i want 15. relationship status 16. favorite movie 17. a fact about my life 18. phobia 19. middle name 20. anything you want to ask
Should anyone need it, I am more than willing to lend you my stick
FOR ANYONE WHO CAN’T READ THIS
[I’m a therapist and keep this poster in my waiting room, apparently it’s saved a few lives
I DON’T LIKE THE PHRASE “A CRY FOR HELP.” I JUST DON’T LIKE HOW IT SOUNDS. WHEN SOMEBODY SAYS TO ME, “I’M THINKING ABOUT SUICIDE, I HAVE A PLAN; I JUST NEED A REASON NOT TO DO IT,” THE LAST THING I SEE IS HELPLESSNESS
I THINK: YOUR DEPRESSION HAS BEEN BEATING YOU UP FOR YEARS. IT’S CALLED YOU UGLY, AND STUPID, AND PATHETIC, AND A FAILURE, FOR SO LONG THAT YOU’VE FORGOTTEN THAT IT’S WRONG. YOU DON’T SEE ANY GOOD IN YOURSELF, AND YOU DON’T HAVE ANY HOPE.
BUT STILL. HERE YOU ARE: YOU’VE COME OVER TO ME, BANGED ON MY DOOR, AND SAID, “HEY! STAYING ALIVE IS REALLY HARD RIGHT NOW! JUST GIVE ME SOMETHING TO FIGHT WITH! I DON’T CARE IF IT’S A STICK! GIVE ME A STICK AND I CAN STAY ALIVE!”
HOW IS THAT HELPLESS? I THINK THAT’S INCREDIBLE. YOU’RE LIKE A MARINE: TRAPPED FOR YEARS BEHIND ENEMY LINES, YOUR GUN HAS BEEN TAKEN AWAY, YOU’RE OUT OF AMMO, YOU’RE MALNOURISHED, AND YOU’VE PROBABLY CAUGHT SOME KIND OF JUNGLE VIRUS THAT’S MAKING YOU HALLUCINATE GIANT SPIDERS.
AND YOU’RE STILL JUST GOING, “GIVE ME A STICK. I’M NOT DYING OUT HERE.“
“A CRY FOR HELP” MAKES IT SOUND LIKE I’M SUPPOSED TO TAKE PITY ON YOU, BUT YOU DON’T NEED MY PITY. THIS ISN’T PATHETIC. THIS IS THE WILL TO SURVIVE. THIS IS HOW HUMANS LIVED LONG ENOUGH TO BECOME THE DOMINANT SPECIES.
WITH NO HOPE, RUNNING ON NOTHING, YOU’RE READY TO CUT THROUGH A HUNDRED MILES OF HOSTILE JUNGLE WITH NOTHING BUT A STICK, IF THAT’S WHAT IT TAKES TO GET TO SAFETY
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.
Couldn’t stop thinking about what would’ve been if Lavi would’ve been at the circus with Bookman back when Red worked there and this is what I came up with!
Gold in their hearts: Aries, Leo, Sagittarius
Silver in their blood: Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn
Stars in their eyes: Gemini, Libra, Aquarius
Rainbows in their smile: Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces
Because Why Not? 