has anyone ever before been so comprehensively torn to shreds in their life tho
My favorite part about that line is that it implies that Gilderoy Lockhart was a more competent teacher than Dolores Umbridge. And that may be the biggest insult in the entire series.
And the triple burn goes to Minerva, because while we, the readers, aren’t anti-werewolf, Umbridge is and she knows full well who taught Harry in his third year.
Professor Quierrel while possessed by Voldemort, Gilderoy Lockhart, Remus Lupin and Barty Crouch Jr. pretending to be Mad Eye Moody were all more competent Defense Against the Dark Arts teachers.
As readers, we all know that Remus was the best. But the insult to Umbridge over all four…it’s delicious.
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 It was a temp gig working their out of date system while they moved over to a new one, since my knowing MS Dos apparently made me qualified.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.
For @twistedangelsays: AU where Wolfgang takes up his uncle’s criminal empire. Obviously, spoilers for the special episode of Sense8.
So Wolfgang’s uncle was a fucking crime king. He doesn’t know why he’s surprised. He’s all ready to shoot the offer down and go
on his merry way—who the fuck offers
a quarter of Berlin to some safecracker just because he happened to off the old
boss, anyway—and then… He imagines Sun,
in prison because she wouldn’t throw her brother under the bus, and her dark
eyes glittering in the harsh light of her cell.
He imagines Nomi, constantly reaching out to visit them in order to not
go stir-crazy in the hiding places the American government is forcing her
into. He imagines Lito, barely treading
water against the downward drag of prejudice, and Capheus, who has already
swapped so much of his innocence for medicine.
He imagines Will, already taking on the pale look of an addict to
protect them all.
Look, it’s simple. Wolfgang has always been good at looking out for
number one, and now number one is an eighth of a whole. Looking out for number one, these days, means
making sure that he looks out for all of his fractional selves, and they need
money, and clout, and somewhere safe.
He takes the offer. He’ll figure it out as he goes.
It’s dark in Seoul when he visits Sun that
night—he’s really gotten himself in over his head this time, and he needs her
steady presence—and she gracefully flips herself down from where she’s doing a
handstand against the wall. He’s sitting
against the wall of her cell when he says, “I’ve got a fucking story to tell
you.” Sun nods, folding herself into a cross-legged
position, and he takes a moment to wonder how he’s supposed to explain.
He can’t come up with anything particularly
diplomatic, so he takes a deep breath and says bluntly, “My uncle was in charge
of a quarter of Berlin, and it turns out I’m his fucking heir.”
Sun stares at him like it’s the craziest
thing she’s heard in weeks, which he finds unlikely. “What?”
Wolfgang bares his teeth and says, “I got
promoted.”
It’s a fucking trip to explain it to the others.
Kala is disappointed, which…he wishes he was surprised by that, but it’s
not like he’s lied to her about who he is.
Nomi probably rolls with it best, except for Capheus, because Capheus is
just unconquerably happy whenever the cluster is together and no petty little
criminal empire is going to change that. He hugs Riley and gets a kiss on the cheek
from Lito and actually laughs like a kid when Wolfgang admits to the
situation. Nomi starts making
suggestions immediately, and under any other circumstances Wolfgang might be
offended, but the truth is that he needs the help, so he nods and writes down
what she says.
Riley is the first one to bring up the
obvious question, because for all that she’s quiet and shy even within their
cluster, she’s ferociously
loyal. “So,” she asks, a quiet murmur
that nonetheless brings debate to a halt, “can you help get Sun out of prison?”
Sun looks up in surprise from where Lito is
teaching her a clapping game to keep her busy in her cell.
Wolfgang grins. “Well, I didn’t take the offer for the
fucking benefits.”
It’s unfathomably weird, some month and a
half later, to have a tiny Korean woman in a business-formal dress turn up at
his door, really truly there and
scowling at his bodyguard (he only has one, and only because he couldn’t make
him leave). She’s been yelling in Korean
for five minutes by the time someone gets Wolfgang, and her frown evaporates as
she throws herself at him in a hug.
“Look!” she shouts in Korean that he
understands, dragging him outside into the perpetual Berlin rain—worse than
usual today, plastering her hair to her face.
He lets himself be dragged, because it would be bad for his reputation
if he was beaten up by this tiny woman, and Sun-Capheus-Riley-Lito grabs his
hands to spin in a circle. “I am free!”
“Yeah,” Wolfgang laughs, feeling his fractional
selves at his back. “Yeah, you are.”
…..most of alderaan probably thought leia was a jedi anyway.
I mean, one minute the viceroy is a lauded senator and alderaan’s queen is childless, and the jedi are heroes, fighting a noble war against the separatists. Then suddenly the chancellor emperor is declaring that the jedi had to be cleansed, and senator organa slinks back to alderaan in unexplained semi-disgrace, and the queen has an infant daughter who is just Way Too Pale to be either bail or breha’s natural-born child
“an orphan,” the queen and viceroy of alderaan tell absolutely everyone.
“a jedi orphan,” absolutely everyone replies. “saved from the destruction of the jedi temple. where the jedi lived.”
“no no, just a regular normal orphan with nothing force-sensitive about her! what a silly idea, our daughter being a powerful jedi. are we even sure jedi really existed? emperor palpatine makes some good points, about them never having existed.“
“we literally have 700 hours of holonews footage that’s just viceroy organa hanging out on the warfront with a bunch of jedi.”
“I don’t recall that,” bail says cheerfully. “and neither does my daughter, who is force-sensitive as a box of bricks.”
(leia is eight when she dreams of her father in the war. he is holding a sword of fire, and he breathes too loudly, harsh in her ears—she is scared, and so she reaches for him, seeking comfort,and suddenly he turns on her. he is shadow and death and that awful sword of fire, not her father at all, and he says in a breath of smoke, who—?
she wakes up to her father’s arms, real and warm, cradling her to his chest. it was only a nightmare, bail says, as she cries. shh, it wasn’t real.)
”on alderaan, they say she was an orphan rescued from the destruction of the jedi temple,” general tarkin says. “that she is a jedi too.” the footage is grainy, but tarkin can make out the shape of her well enough, the princess throwing herself against the cell door. such dramatics.
“impossible,” darth vader says from beside tarkin. the vocoder makes it hard to read his tone. “I killed every child that breathed.”
presidentromana asked: Prompt: Animorphs AU where Tobias is raised by Loren, perhaps about how it'd change the nothlit thing or his interactions with Ax?
I spent several minutes considering whether this should be an AU where Loren has her memories of Elfangor or doesn’t. I went with yes because… why not?
I was sitting in front of the TV listening to the local news about the “fireworks” at the construction site when Tobias came in and said, “Hey, Mom. Jake invited me along to check out the Sharing meeting at the beach later. Can I go?”
Cold dread trickled into my veins. I had hoped the war would never touch us. It wasn’t our war to fight; we didn’t have the weapons. But finally, it had come to my doorstep. “No,” I said firmly. “I need you help to me clean the house this evening. You’re staying in.”
“What if we start now?” Tobias said. “We could finish early and then I could catch up with Jake?”
I hit mute on the TV. “Tobias. I know some of your classmates have gotten into the Sharing. But I’ve heard about this group through my church friends. They look harmless, but they’re a dangerous cult. Has anyone ever told you what you have to do to become a full member?”
A pause. “Jake’s brother Tom says there’s a minimum number of hours of service, and then you go to a couple of special meetings and you become a full member.”
“But did he tell you what the initiation is like?” I insisted. “The ‘initiation ceremony’ is full members only.”
“No,” Tobias said, a frown in his voice. “He said it was secret. He just said that it totally changed his life.”
“I don’t trust an organization like that and neither should you,” I said firmly. “I won’t allow you to go there. Stay home and help me clean.”
Then there was the news story about the man who found a piece of metal on the beach with strange writing on it. I asked my church friend Mary to describe it to me. It took a while for the image to form in my mind, but when it did, it was unmistakable. Andalite writing. Elfangor had taught it to me.
That night, I dreamed of a thought-speak voice calling to me from the sea.
I woke up in a cold sweat. An Andalite ship had crashed somewhere off the coast of California. There was an Andalite trapped in there, using the ship to broadcast his thought-speech. And somehow, I’d heard his call. My heart ached. There was nothing I could do for him.
I got up and went to the kitchen to get a glass of water. I found that Tobias was already there. “Tobias?” I said. “What are you doing up?”
“Bad dream,” he said.
Oh no. Had the message reached him too? Because of his heritage? Because Elfangor had touched both our lives? “What was it about?” I said, tentatively.
“There was a voice,” he said. “Calling to me from the ocean. It sounded scared. Desperate.”
Part of me wanted to tell him, after a lifetime of keeping the truth to myself. But what good could it possibly do? There was nothing he could do to help the doomed Andalite, either. So I said, “Hey. Why don’t you read to me from the book you’re reading?” It was an old ritual of ours. We went to his bedroom, and he read to me until he yawned between every word, and went back to sleep.
A month or so later, Tobias came to the house with a new friend in tow. “This is Philip, Mom. He’s here to borrow some books.”
“Yes, my name is Phil-up-puh,” the other boy said. “Puh. I am here to read book-suh.”
Playing with sounds. Just like Elfangor did in the first couple of weeks being human.
Then the boy added, stiffly, “I am sorry to intrude, intrud-ud-duh, on your solitude. Tude.”
“Come on, Philip,” Tobias said, and took him to his room.
I sat and frowned over that remark. It took me a minute to remember Elfangor’s distaste for the disabled that I’d had to train him out of, the way he insisted that they should be secluded from society. It probably didn’t mean anything. It was a coincidence. There were autistic humans who played with sound, and plenty of humans who acted weird around a blind woman. But there had to be a way to know. To be sure.
When Philip and Tobias came back out of his room, I was ready. If I was just being paranoid, I could say I’d gotten the phrase from a fantasy book. But if I wasn’t…
“Nice to meet you, Philip,” I said. “May your blade stay sharp, and the four moons guide our paths to cross again one day.”
Dead silence fell. Then I heard a sound I thought I’d never hear again – of bones grinding against each other, organs liquefying.
“Philip,” Tobias said, a little hysterically, but not hysterical enough for the morph to be a surprise. “What are you doing?”
“He’s demorphing,” I said, sounding calmer than I felt. “Tobias, close the curtain on the window of the back door. Just in case.”
“Mom?”
“Do it,” I said. “What if someone walks through the backyard and sees?”
I heard the whistle through the air, and the lightest press of the edge of a tail blade against my throat. «Demorph.»
“I can’t,” I said. “I’m not an Andalite. But I had a child with one.”
I told them everything. I gave enough details that they even believed me.
“You never told me,” Tobias whispered. “I met my dad, and I didn’t even know. I would have known if you’d told me.”
“And you’re fighting a war I swore to myself you’d never have to fight,” I whispered back. “I’m sorry.”
