Basic projector repair job turns into armed encounter at secret bunker Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's reader-contributed column that tells tales of your tech support misadventures. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Andy" who shared a story from his time as a tech support engineer for an audio-visual equipment supplier. "We used to supply all sorts of kit from humble …
Depends if you have the misfortune to cross paths with your RSM/WO on the way who then chews you out for uniform. You might be committing the lesser sin (in practical terms) by not leaving your escortee, but you've still "got it wrong". Especially as an officer who is expected to be setting the example.
Seems slightly unfortunate the entrance/gate to this super secret bunker wasn't manned and the escort couldn't say "just stand here with the guard for a minute while I run down". I suppose it was likely one of those odd-ball entrances in the corner of a base where there's razorwire and a full-height turnstile for general access control but you're already "on base".
That while hats have gone mostly out of style in the "real world", the military's rigid adherence to tradition means hats are still an absolutely necessary part of a uniform - and probably still will be a century from now.
It is funny looking at pictures of life 100 years ago and seeing literally EVERYONE wearing a hat. Its crazy!
“The thong has never gone away completely,” she says. “But for people who are in their teens and 20s, they haven’t really been ‘in fashion’. Once [the fashion industry] has forgotten something, then it can be recuperated – and it makes for a little sense of novelty.”
Pretty sure it is Instagram that's responsible. Plus maybe an assist from the fact that nearly as many women (at least younger women) are lifting weights as men - but instead of obsessing on upper body stuff like bench press and curls like the men do the women are all about the squats and deadlifts to build those glutes. Can be hard to find an open squat rack at my (university town) gym because the college girls are hogging them!
10 or 12 years ago I'd see maybe one girl for every 10 guys doing free weights, they were mostly about the cardio then. The gym removed a bunch of the cardio machines a few years back to make room for more racks.
Walking around without a cover (hat) outdoors is a fucking major no way no how, ESPECIALLY for officers who are expected to set an example and without a cover you can't return a salute (which is a serious breach of protocol as the person saluting you is saluting the sovereign as your commission is issued in their name)
My dad used to work at a military school and they asked parents what they would consider as suitable punishment for extreme cases of bad behaviour.
One of the parents replied with "Anything the school considers suitable, up to (and including) capital punishment".
Good NCOs are the glue that holds any military together. ANY officer, newly hatched or vastly experienced, who doesn't immediately think twice on hearing a respectful "Are you sure about that, Sir?" from their senior NCO is overconfident. Even if they decide to go ahead anyway, they at least need to look again for anything they might have missed.
The book 'The Idealogical Brain' has an entire chapter devoted to the importance of knowing how someone reacts to being wrong. Also try Norman Dixon's 'On the psychology of military incompetence', although personally my preference is for Sir Humphrey's response to Jim Hacker's request for honesty: "If you must do this damn' fool thing, don't do it in this damn' fool way!"
Interestingly enough, a major difference between the Soviet Russian army and Western ones is their relative lack of NCOs for command purposes (you might see more of them as technical specialists).
Might be one factor in Russia's tremendous successes on the battlefield in Ukraine.
Makes my blood boil when an advert announces that the company concerned has "a thousand Engineers" waiting to come and fix your boiler/car/washing machine. No they don't, they may have a thousand technicians, but not one of them is a time served Engineer who has spent at least four years gaining a Degree in an engineering subject. I have complained to the Advertising Standards Bureau, but they shrug it off and say that it has become common usage. Bah! Humbug!
This was a trip to a banks HQ - we were meant to be escorted at all times.
Our last day (after a couple of week visit) we could see the exterior badge locked door (for staff) was green - so we went in. We only had paper badges saying visitor.
We went to the secure inner sanctum, and the door was open because the cleaner needed the plug outside the room - to be able to clean inside the room.
We sat down and waited. Our contact came in and asked - "how did you get in here?" so we told him.
It turned out there had been a power blip somewhere - and the doors failed safe to unlocked.
They installed a "plug for cleaners" inside the inner sanctum.
A colleague in the US went to a secure underground nuclear bunker site for a briefing. He was accompanied everywhere at all times by an armed marine. When I say everywhere, the toilet cubicles did not have doors on them!
He said the whole experience was very scary.
I was once briefed by a man on security, who did not exist..... he said he worked for our company, but was not in the internal phone directory.
"he said he worked for our company, but was not in the internal phone directory."
Although I worked in a different building I used to eat in the canteen of the tower block, half occupied by BT*, at the corner of Euston Rd & Hampstead Rd. There was rumoured to be an entire hidden floor floor that the lift bypassed.
* The company I worked for had BT and the other occupants of the building as clients. The price paid in the canteen depended on which client you were working for.
"There was rumoured to be an entire hidden floor floor that the lift bypassed."
There probably was. Most tall buildings have one (or more). They are mechanical rooms, HVAC, water, sewer, Pneumatic tube stuff, telco stuff, etc. Usually they are serviced only by the freight elevator(s), often with key access only to those floors. Quite often it is only a portion of a floor that is partitioned off from the general population.
I know of several that are three or four stories high, others that are no more than cable-chases that are large enough for a man to crawl through that open into larger rooms dotted about a couple of floors.
Take a look at a picture of 432 Park Avenue in Manhattan ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/432_Park_Avenue ) you can clearly see these spaces every dozen floors or so.
Note that there is nothing nefarious[0] about any of this; it's all just mechanical stuff that keeps the building running smoothly. Or not, as is apparently the case of 432 Park.
[0] Although I sometimes wonder about the sanity of the architectural firms involved ...
Some tall buildings claim not to have a 13th floor. Due to the silly superstition, they number them ... 11, 12, 14, 15, ... Well, Toronto City Hall has one, but it's inaccessible, as you've described. It's the wide band half way up, especially visible in this night shot.
I had cause to visit an upper floor once and noticed the missing "13" elevator button, along with an extra-long ride between 12 and 14. I'd always surmised that #13 was physical plant. Thanks for all-but-confirming it.
(Actually, it looks as though the physical-plant floor is only #13 in the east building (on the right in the photo), but #11 in the west building. That's kind of disappointing, to be honest; it struck me as a particularly elegant way to kill two birds with one stone. (Hint to floor counters: the podium -- the wide part at the bottom, partially obscured by the gaudy "Toronto" sign -- is two storeys high.))
There probably was. Most tall buildings have one (or more).
There's a popular London datacentre that has/had one. Stop at the <redacted> floor and meet a couple of armed guards. The influx of ISPs and bored techies lead to people saying 'yeh, we're on the <redacted> floor*' and then the datacentre introducing ID cards to collect at their security desk and access controls added to the lifts. Whoever had that floor probably got fed up with having to fill out contact forms and got the datacentre to upgrade their security. But been to many an interesting location with FUN! stuff like escort stopping by doors, pressing a bell that signalled folks behind the door to cover up anything sensitive because a stranger was amongst them. One of the first times I'd seen whiteboards with curtains though.
Often the biggest challenge visiting sensitive customers was simply finding them. They generally don't advertise or have nice signs saying 'Acme Ltd'. Or having sat navs bleating at me because it thought I'd driven into the middle of a forest.
*bastids!
In the US you have red flashing lights that are activated whenever some outsider is in the facility. They signal that any classified data is to be hidden. (This explains the rotating beacons you see in movie sets of big military control rooms -- normally they'd be off except when people like movie producers are visiting...)
Often the biggest challenge visiting sensitive customers was simply finding them. They generally don't advertise or have nice signs saying 'Acme Ltd'.
I've had that running training courses; Orange UK only had a tiny orange square on the entrance - and in the US, Verizon Wireless were behind a numbered door in an anonymous building on an anonymous road on the outskirts of a large city (Denver IIRC). Satnav wasn't great in those days so had to rely on hire car maps.
I used to pass a building on the way to work that had zero identification, obviously fortified construction, and irregularly timed visits from security vans through the very strong gates.
I realised what it was when I noticed that it backed onto Hatton Garden.
(London street full of jewellery shops.)
There probably was. Most tall buildings have one (or more). They are mechanical rooms, HVAC, water, sewer, Pneumatic tube stuff, telco stuff, etc.
And some not so tall ones. The Waterfront campus in Southampton (part of the National Oceanography Centre) is 50/50. Only floors 1, 4 and 6 are normally accessible. Like most science/lab-heavy buildings the others are "officially" service floors for plant, allowing ceiling/floor access so that labs can be reconfigured easily (moving gas/water/electric supplies for benches, etc without having to rip out too much stuff) as well as the specialist plant like the distilled water1.
We all knew it was actually where they kept the super-intelligent dolpins though.
1. Purified water was on tap in some labs. In fact I think it was more specialist than just distilled but can't remember what they called it. There would be ructions when someone used the wrong tap to fill up a flume tank or something and emptied the storage tank. All the biochemists would have the morning off until production caught up.
The (former) main campus library at my undergrad alma mater had an older section (5 floors plus basement) and a newer section (4 floors above ground -- not sure about basement) with the same roof elevation:
That sandwiched third floor -- with the newer section using that volume to extend 2 and 4 -- had limited use, so it was a great place to get quiet study or to find open catalog terminals (some still existed - including in the basement, naturally, and sooooo much faster than a no-keyboard web interface).
The best way to navigate was via the one mid-floor narrow stairwell that stopped at 3, 4L, 4U instead of a blank landing like between other floors.
A new main library was being built when I graduated, and the former renovated since, but I haven't visited either to see if such nostalgic architectural quirks still exist. I do know the terminals and all catalog telnet are long gone.
(New Main also combined in the former "science library", which had an even worse layout that I am NOT nostalgic about.)
"Usually they are serviced only by the freight elevator(s)"
I worked in a manufacturing plant with a floor 1 1/2, with no button to stop there. The way to access it was to ride the freight elevator between the first and second floors, and when approximately lined up with floor 1.5, open the inner elevator door. The elevator would detect the door was open and level itself out with the floor.
A little scary, to be honest, opening the door in a moving elevator. Watch your fingers.
I remember visiting there for a few days. I think it was BT who had pre-paid charge cards for the canteen. Since I was visiting the DHSS lot, I paid cash, which worked out cheaper.
There were two distinct groups of canteen customers. One lot sat by the windows so they could take in the view. The other lot huddled as far from the windows as they could.
By some mysterious quirk of aerodynamics, winds at pavement level just outside could reach gale force on the calmest of days.
I've walked past Euston Tower leaning at an angle of 45 degrees...
The silver windowed block across the road was the HQ of Prudential Assurance which, after the infamous Michael Fish 'hurricane', ended up with several of the large panes smashed. They remained boarded up for months... it's as if they had forgotten to paid their insurance!
I think it was BT who had pre-paid charge cards for the canteen. Since I was visiting the DHSS lot, I paid cash, which worked out cheaper.
The DEC training centre in Reading was in the Shire Hall council offices. A DEC badge, or a visitor/trainee badge, got cheaper cafeteria prices than the council employees, to their considerable annoyance.
When I was working for Tyre Services (GB) Ltd. as a breakdown tyre fitter, I had on several occasions to attend a tyre failure at Corley Services on the M6, quite close to our depot. On my first visit, and after changing a lorry tyre, I went to get a cuppa at the Truck Stop, but it was closed and I was redirected to the front services. I entered the canteen there, still wearing my overalls and smeared with grease, rubber dust, and tarmac skidmarks, and asked the lady for a cup of tea. She looked at my dishevelled appearance and asked "You transport, dear?" On my admittance that I was, she reached under the counter and brought forth an enormous china mug, at least half a pint in capacity, and proceeded to fill it with tea, for which she charged me the princely sum of 10P. I always visited her on subsequent trips to Corley.
20 Fenchurch Street, aka the Walkie Talkie, is like that, with the wind against whichever direction you're wealking (or so it seems, going to and from buying lunch)
Once worked with a guy who used to be part of West Germany's millitary intelligence. He often went to a tall building near the border with East Germany to work on some RF equipment that pointed east.
He said that on some visits, the "men in black" would get on the elevator, turn a key on the panel, and the elevator doors would open at a floor with no number. He knew not to talk to or acknowledge the men in black. Those guys worked on the equipment that looked *west*.
I did a project for GPT (GEC Plessey Telecommunications) in Coventry. The site had its own golf club, complete with silver service restaurant.The managers used to get a free 3-course lunch if they brought a business guest to the club. I was there on assignment for a couple of months, working on their reporting system, which they had taken over from Plessey, when the Telecoms divisions merged. I "had" to go the golf club every lunch time.
On one day, I had to go into town to the bank to pay off my credit card, so that I could pay the hotel bill at the end of the week(*). They were miffed about missing their lunch, so I was sent into town early on company time, just so I was back in time to go to the golf club for lunch.
Another time, I was working a the Devonport Royal Dockyard, helping install a new personnel system. I was rushed onto the project at the last minute (I had only been at the company for about 3 months and it was my first major assignment). To get into DRD, you needed a positive vetting, which took a minimum of 6 weeks. I was given the paperwork on the Friday night, before I headed down with the team the following Monday and handed in the papers. Visitors got 3 day passes, before they needed a full pass, no ifs, no buts. So I went in on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday without too many hassles, on Thursday, the guard looked at my papers and said, "you've had your 3 passes, you will have to wait for the vetting to complete, before you can come back on site."
That was an issue, so I simply asked him, if he had heard, that the personnel system was being swapped out? He replied in the affirmative. I then told him, that I was responsible for converting the payroll data from the old system to the new system, and if I couldn't come on site, he and his colleagues wouldn't be paid at the end of the month... 10 minutes later, I was marching towards our office with a 3 month temporary pass.
Where there is a will, there is a way.
(*) Back then, I had problems with my credit card, the limit was so low (250 quid the first year) that I had extreme problems, when working away from home. My first assignment was in Plymouth woking at the Navy dockyard (see above). We were staying in the Copthorne hotel and the weekly bill was 250UKP, so the exact limit of my card. So I had to pay the bill Friday morning, we worked until lunch bombed up the M4 back to our base, between Southampton and Portsmouth, where I would have to rush through my expenses sheet, rush to the cashier on site and get it cashed, then on Saturday go to the bank and pay off my credit card, so that I could pay the hotel bill the next week. After a month of that, The company wouldn't give me an advance and when I asked the bank, if they could increase my limit, they refused. I got a different credit card a few weeks later, which eased the problem, but some months still pushed it to its limit.
> Back then, I had problems with my credit card,
I feel your pain as I had a slightly different situation where the wrong planets aligned on checkout day - there is nothing worse that standing at the front desk of a hotel and being unable to pay as the only card you have does not have enough clear balance on it.
Thankfully a call to the bank and some funds shuffling sorted it but not something I would wish on anyone.
When I did a contract for the Defense Logistics Agency I had to get a top secret clearance, which is a pain in the ass multi step process. Once I achieved basic clearance I was able to start some work (mostly security training) but the first six weeks of the gig I had to travel to the location of the DoD contractor I contracting with, because until I had my CAC card (the sort of goverment/military ID the US uses) I would not be able to login from home so I had to be on their site to use their secure connection to the DoD. Eventually I was notified that they had an appointment for me to receive my CAC card, and gave me information about when and where.
The issuance of this card took place at a military base located about an hour away. So I drive my rental car out there, show the paperwork and my ID to the guy at the outside gate like I'd been briefed, etc. and they tell me where to park and to wait in my car until my escort arrived to take me through the next gate into the base proper. So this young female Lieutenant shows up, asks to see my ID to confirm I still the same person who entered the gate five minutes ago, and tells me to follow her. After about 10 minutes of walking through the inner gate, grounds, and a large building we get to where they issue the cards and there's a note on the door that says "back at 1400", and it is about 1:15 so there is going to be a long wait. She does not look happy about this.
So we sit there in silence, alone in a long hallway outside that office. After a few minutes I'm getting bored so I ask her a question about a poster or something I see next to the door across the hall. She's cold at first but after talking a few minutes she warms up to me a bit and we're laughing about something or other just as a Colonel comes out of the room immediately across the hall. She immediately stands up and salutes, and I stand up too just because I'd feel dumb sitting there when she's standing and saluting and he looks us up and down for a few seconds, grunts, and walks away. Not sure if by talking/laughing with me she was doing something improper as an escort, but I sure got that feeling based on the fact she didn't say another word to me the whole time!
I once went for a job as ground crew at a small air freight company on Bowman Field, Louisville KY. While I was waiting to see the Managing Director to be interviewed, I was chatting with the young secretary on the front desk. I eventually got the job, and the other mechanics gave me the nickname "Spider". I asked why this was and was told that they thought that I was a crawler, chatting up the MD's daughter in order to curry favour and get the job. I protested that I had no idea that she was the MD's daughter, that I wasn't chatting her up, and that I already had a GF who I would not want to two-time. They accepted my protestation, but still called me Spider for the whole time I worked there.
Someone I worked with told the story once of having to go on-site at such a place. IIRC it was our server he had to do some maintenance on, but it was colocated at their secure datacenter. (Not defence-related, but highly confidential for other, purely civilian but justified, reasons.)
At any rate, it was the whole unmarked-building, accompanied-at-all-times deal, plus the kicker: he wasn't allowed to touch the machine he was there to service. He had to dictate the commands he wanted executed, while one of their people typed them in.
Then there was the short-term gig I had at a major financial firm. Not a secure site by any means; it was just a garden-variety office. Physical security was the usual pass-card-to-unlock-the-door deal. As is typical, the doors in question had signs informing one that the doors would automatically unlock in case of emergency.
A floor or two below my workplace was their public-facing office -- fancy reception area and all. My floor, though, wasn't open to the public. The company had the whole floor, so there was no need for the usual directory, office numbers, etc. When I'd get off the elevator each morning, I'd find myself in a bare, utterly featureless hallway, with three elevators on each side and a mag-locked door at each end. The thing is, the doors weren't labelled or numbered; there was no indication as to which one was which. I had to pick one at random, and it was always a toss-up whether I'd guess right, or have to walk half-way around the office once I was inside to get to my desk.
It must have been a week before I finally twigged that there was in fact a way to tell the doors apart: both of those "automatic unlock" signs were on the same side of the elevator hallway. The door I wanted had its sign on the right; the other one had it on the left.
OK, I can kind of get why they wouldn't display the company name -- why give away more information than you need to? But couldn't they have at least numbered the doors? What was the point of that extra level of obfuscation, given that they both gave access to the same open-concept office?
Alas, I don't watch enough TV to have initially gotten your joke. Having looked it up, though...
Lumon Industries' web site was singularly unhelpful, as I suppose is to be expected. Just links to Etsy sites selling, well, Etsy tchotchkes.
How did I finally gain some small measure of enlightenment? From this amusing who-we-aren't blog post from the real-life Lumon Group. (They do windows -- the glass kind, not the M$ kind.) Kudos to them for going along with it. I have to wonder, though, whether they see the whole situation as a royal PITA or valuable earned media. Probably both...
You remind me of time I spent working for a Financial Services company in Sheffield, notable in memory for having to individually badge through every door in both directions (regardless if you were coming through with someone else). One weekend, having led my team to tackle a "cab tidy" we'd powered the lot at 5pm to find a network look in-play. As that evening was the annual company "event" and it was a 9-5 M-F org, I elected to send the team home and re-group at 10am the next day, heading to the event myself.
At ~02:30AM with my team a little worse for wear I had the bright idea to head back in and fix the loop so they could sleep in on Sunday. This I duly did within around 90 minutes...before letting the door shut to the server room with my pass still in it. As a FS company, I'd need it to badge out of the floor and also to leave the building. A sheepish call to my #2 had him come rescue me...
That in turn reminds me of fighting the man-traps in Telehouse North, where the toilet was outside the secured entry and server inside. For this one, you scanned something (retina? 3d finger? fingerprint?) and then went in the man-trap, a Star Trek transporter looking thing with a door at front and back, and scales in the base. The door behind closed (painfully slowly), and only then did it consider whether your biometric and weight married something it expected: if it did, the front door opened; if not, the door behind you opened and you started again, with no indication as to why. Often with these projects there's the thought of "it's a 30 min build, so I'll get it going and *then* go out to the toilet". At one point, having drunk rather a lot of water and the prep taken a little longer than hoped, I finally ran off. I fought the thing fourteen times before it let me out. I learned my lesson.
> the toilet cubicles did not have doors on them
Pretty standard for American bogs.....
....at least, the gaps around / above / under the bog cubicle doors are so large, you wonder if the pissed-up carpenter responsible took their inspiration from wild-west saloon doors.
I was allowed to drop my toolkit, a new CRT, laser printer and my briefcase in the loading bay of a major global bank in London and then I drove out to find parking.
When I got back to the loading bay, the bomb squad was apparently on its way and a building evac was just about to be called because there had been a shift change of security guard and the one going off duty did not mention me in the handover.
Apparently the new guard caught sight of the toolkit, my Samsonite, silver-coloured briefcase and reached for the phone.
I once worked for a dual-use board manufacturer i.e. there were legitimate civilian and armed forces uses for the rugged boards.
Just after the turn of the century a military Land Rover, 2 Squadies and an Officer turned up at the security gate. (The security guard later confessed to this being a "brown trouser" moment, but the visitors were very polite.) The board they brought had a finger width round hole near the middle and they wanted the non-volatile memory downloading to a device they had brought with them and then the board destroying. The 2 Squadies carried rifles and the Officer a Pistol/Revolver (I only saw them from a distance) and only the company technical manager and whoever was working on the board at the time were allowed within the room (or 22 yards when it was a more open area - yes very precise, although the length suggest that someone just stated "the length of a cricket pitch!)
Anyway the non-volatile memory (after metalwork, conformal coat etc. were removed) was removed from the board and placed on one of our "Golden Sample" boards used for test equipment calibration. The download then occurred without issue. But then they insisted both the original board and our "Golden Sample" had to be destroyed, rather than the non-volatile memory just being removed and destroyed with the original board. This cost us tens of thousands of pounds on the lost board and its replacement, but was insisted on by someone 5 or 6 ranks higher, over the Officers phone while the Squadies had the rifles pointed at the company technical manager and the CEO.
(I only learned these scant detail later, but had I known about the pointed rifles, I might have tried to induce a firing in true BOFH style.)
Back in the mid 90s I was regularly visiting the Department of Trade and Industry in Victoria Street, London. Until 1997 I used to be able to book a parking space in the underground car park, but that was stopped when the new government decided they wanted the spaces for MPs instead. Entry to the car park involved advanced booking of both vehicle registration and occupants but entry was usually without issue. However I then had to exit the car park by the entry ramp and walk round to the front door to get a visitor pass.
Visitors were supposed to be escorted at all times and this was generally the case. I would arrive and ask for my contact, who would come and meet me at reception and escort me to where I need to be. They would then escort me from the building at the end of the day. However, on many occasions, I would go out of the building for lunch. On the way out, my contact with carefully escort me to the door where I would hand my pass in to the security officer and mention that I was just popping out for lunch and will be back in a while which meant they would keep my badge for me to use on my return.
Quite often on return to the building I would walk in and the security officer would hand hand me back my visitors pass with a "you know where you're going, don't you, sir?" and let me through the barrier. My contact was always annoyed when I appeared back in the office unaccompanied!
I used to very occasionally visit the MoD main building in London. They had a rule that if you went there 3 or more times in a year you could not get a paper pass, but would get a photo pass and PIN for entry / exit. I hated it. You try remembering a 4 digit PIN you last used 6 months ago and are not allowed to write down. Plus I always got lost inside so had to politely ask directions from anyone I could find. Really glad when I could surrender that pass. And the vertical tube entry system was a bit on the claustrophobic side for me. On the plus side no one ever pointed an actual rifle or other firearm at me AFAIK ...
Even interviews can be marked secret.
I was once sent for a job interview for the Mod on recommendation of some people who worked at a TLA.
No one would tell me what the job was for. No one would give feedback, or ever contact me again if I failed. I wasn't allowed to say what the questions I was asked or the exams were.
I had to sign the secrets act twice before the interview and once after.
Basically a clear plastic cylinder with a gap. You put your card in the reader, entered your PIN and stepped onto the pad (which was weight sensitive). The cylinder rotated so that the gap allowed you to enter or leave the building, or just kept you there while the guards decided what to do.
Typically known as a "Man Trap" - I've used both the vertical rotating cylinder type, plus the more straightforward "2 automatic doors where no more than one can be open at any time" at various customer sites.
Part of the job was seeing how assorted clients treated security. So visiting pretty much all commercial sites that had fancy man-traps as a bit of security theatre. Rock up to those with a nice folding trolley loaded with switches, routers, tools, testers and get confronted by one of those cylinders. Great. Then being shown to the goods lift that bypassed most of that security. Also some included scales to weigh you in & out which could get FUN! when the visit was to install something.
Then the really secure sites, which would have man-traps and still had goods lifts.. but getting access took more time, paperwork and escorts. Which was interesting & made sense for bunker locations given the need for blast doors etc but also replace & maintain bulky HVAC kit. Then the most secure were like Hotel California and if you took anything into the secure side, it never left.. Which could be anything from basic tools to laptops or expensive test kit.
"Also some included scales to weigh you in & out which could get FUN! when the visit was to install something."
The man trap at the customer site I visited at La Defense, Paris allegedly weighed people - however nothing ever triggered despite me arriving each morning with laptop bag, leaving at lunchtime without laptop bag, re-entering after lunch with some slight extra weight but no laptop bag, and then leaving in the evening with laptop bag.
"Which was interesting & made sense for bunker locations given the need for blast doors etc but also replace & maintain bulky HVAC kit."
I remember a particular Scandinavian Data Centre which was a bunker (non-military though) underneath the capital city. It had a large blastproof door approx 3-4 metres high at the main pedestrian entrance that was left open permanently.
We used to deliver and install PCs there in the late 80s.
In most organisations the big-wigs occupy the upper levels of their buildings, so when we received an order for delivery to "Top Floor, Main Building, Whitehall", we expected people with lots of scrambled egg decoration on their jackets.
On arrival, we found that the lift didn't go that high. The recipients were in what had obviously been converted store rooms.
The actual Top Brass had offices on the ground floor, so as to be nearer to The Bunker.
Once upon a time I had the joys of working in cleanroom manufacturing, as a client for an American startup with lots of money and people but very little sense.
Someone at the client got fired (again) and our new liason at the company was a bloke from effectively "Nowhereville, Midwest USA" who had never held a passport in his life never mind travelled outside the USA. I remember him grumbling after arrival in the UK that a pub near his hotel wouldn't let him pay in US dollars.
I recall being on the conference call when he first decided to travel over to our factory, and he asked "of course, I'll be bringing my concealed carry - can you make sure to reserve a gun locker for me at the site?"
He was somewhat surprised to discover that no, a Illinois-issued concealed carry permit wasn't likely to be accepted at the airport for international travel, and no, we didn't have gun lockers...!
Many years ago (and just realised it's 50 - and I suddenly feel old) I was visiting a military establishment where they developed tank armour. I was there to look at one of the manufacturing processes they used as it might also be of use to my employer (my job back then was developing new manufacturing techniques to produce the ever more demanding designs put out by the engineers).
The checks and signing in process at the site gatehouse was very thorough (although I jumped the visitor queue there as I already had the necessary security grade clearance). Every visitor had to wear a visitor pass and be accompanied at all times by an authorised member of staff. Armed guards at each gate, and at various points around the site. At lunchtime, my host said they needed to run some personal errands so I'd need to make my own way to the canteen and back. "Across the green (watch out for tanks), down the steps and through the green door." I pointed out that security rules clearly stated that all visitors had to be escorted. "Just put your visitor badge in your pocket," that replied. "Then nobody will know you're not staff." Sure enough, my visit to the canteen was totally unhindered by any security issues.
It wasn't uncommon, back then, for the default to assume you were legitimate unless you wore a visitor badge - the idea being that security checks meant you wouldn't be there unless authorised, and the visitor badge meant staff would be ready to offer directions, etc. The same idea worked on many industrial sites where visitors and new starts wore green hard hats so staff knew to keep an eye out for unfamiliarity and step in to help.
"met by a military officer in the car park who watched carefully as he unpacked his tools and ladder then accompanied him onto the site."
Wow, things were a bit lax back them. Nowadays, when I go into a "secure" site, I have to provide, in advance, a list of all items being taken in and that list will be checked and matched against reality on both arrival and departure and, in some case, moving from a "secure" area to a "very secure" area. Mostly, phones and cameras are forbidden, often *anything* with data storage capability may also be forbidden, which can make fault diagnosing difficult. Removing anything from site with data storage capability is usually forbidden. Bearing in mind that's not just a hard disk or computer these days as most of the components for anything electronic is likely to have some form of flash storage these days. Hell, even a stick of RAM has an EEPROM on it that might be used to exfiltrate some data.
I'm glad I rarely, if ever, visit sites like that any more. Getting patted down multiple times per day by stony-faced, steely-eyed people with guns is not fun. Even a pretty, young blonde lady patting you down is a lot less fun when the aforementioned "work face" is on :-/
I did find some of the less accurately stated security requirements amusing. Often people do not seem to consider pencils and paper or notebooks to be 'data storage' devices.
One, draft, document required that after four log on attempts the account would be locked. This for a mere RESTRICTED system. (I quoted John McEnroe's most notorious outburst in my comment on that one.) Other instances included requirements to suspend or terminate users (rather than the user accounts), but my favourite has to be that the terminals for the new system would not emit radiation. I bit my tongue somewhat and suggested they include the word "harmful' in that requirement.
Being a grammar pedant is, very occasionally, almost fun!
I had that the other way round with terminals, they had to be able to withstand radiation. The supplier was supposed to deliver shielded VT220 terminals, which cost a pretty penny more than the standard unshielded variety, he thought he could save a few quid, so he delivered unshielded one.
Everything went swimmingly, until a US Navy ship in the harbour turned on his radar for tests (he was supposed to do that first in open waters), dozens of suddenly dead terminals scattered around the dockyard. It cost the supplier a lot more than he had planned to save, when he had to replace all of the terminals.
At another site, we had a lightning strike and we lost a couple of hundred VT100 terminals. They were classed as valuable tech that couldn't be exported to the East Block under Cocom regulations. We had to arrange for them to be destroyed, for the destruction to be observed by an authorised civil servant and once they were crushed (luckily the place next door was a scrapyard with a metal compactor), we got a certificate we had to hold onto, to prove the terminals had been properly disposed of!
A couple of years later, I simply took an old VT100 home with me, to plug into my Commodore Amiga to use it to run a shell over the serial port... Things changed quickly back then.
It is similar at one of the Chemparks, where we have a site. Getting stuff out is even worse. Last year I was there to help sort out old kit that could be disposed of and ended up with around 150 old HDDs that needed to be destroyed, so I was bringing them back to add to our collection. I had to get a chit that listed the drives.
Last time, we were there over a weekend and staying in a hotel, so I had my private iPad with me, when I got to the gate, I had to check-in my laptop, work iPad and personal iPad separately, plus the 2 firewalls that we were bringing to replace the old ones. Luckily I wrote all the serial numbers down in a list, before I drove down there, so I only had to grab my personal iPad from the car and show the serial number.
Interestingly, a colleague got a sodding great big sticker with a serial number on it stuck to the lid of his Dell laptop, but they didn't do that for my MacBook Air...
Not exactly national security, but I was once brought down by a guard dog when working on an automatic weather monitoring station at an open cast coal mine.
Nobody had thought to tell security that we might still be working after 5pm.
Closest I could find to a dog with big teeth ---->
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~1985. As Customer Engineer I had to deliver a computer and printer to Garden Island West Australia to HMAS something or other. Passed through security in my car, parked. A crewmember came to get the boxes, he carried one. I was not told stay where I was so I helpfully picked up the other box and followed him on board.
Not sure if I was supposed to do that. I might have seen a look of surprise when he turned around. We deposited boxes to the left of where we entered and I disembarked.
Many moons ago at a different employer (but post 9/11) went on a tech sales visit to an outpost of the Indiana National Guard.
Drove into the base slowly as the entrance gate was up and there was nobody on sentry duty. After parking tried to find somebody on reception but gave up after 5 minutes with nobody responding. Wandered around and bumped into somebody who told us where our contact could be found. No checks on us as obvious civilians carrying bags, no security passes provided.
Proceeded to spend 1/2 an hour talking to an estates guy who was so obviously off his head on weed or something stronger. He took a full minute to respond to any question and his eyes were rolling round in their sockets alarmingly.
On another (non-IT related) occasion was crossing the France/Belgium border and the French customs officers were so busy playing cards that they wouldn't come out for several minutes so we drove through. Immediately followed by car screeching to a halt and slowly reversing towards the by now tooled up with sub-machine gun officers. They complained that they were just finishing an important hand so we should have waited but when they realised we were English they just shrugged and told us to bugger off.
Immediately followed by car screeching to a halt and slowly reversing towards the by now tooled up with sub-machine gun officers.
Funniest response I've seen was while commuting between Reading & Newbury. That used to have convoys carrying <something> to a site along the route. Was impressive to watch the police bikes and cars clear the road so the convoy could pass. So pull over, wait a bit and carry on. Except one time a BWM driver decided they weren't going to wait and attempted to overtake. Then was very quickly boxed in and the driver found himself looking at some very serious types with submachine guns. Which prompted the driver to have a literal brown-trouser moment, which the escorts didn't care about at all. Made me a bit late for work, but was entertaining to watch and those folks don't mess around.
It's illegal to attempt overtake a military convoy on a single carriage-way road and potentially illegal on a multi-lane road if the rear vehicle is signed as "No Overtaking". More so if there's a Police escort enforcing road closures etc, as your BMW driver discovered.
When approaching a military vehicle from behind on the public road, you should check if it's a convoy or not before trying to overtake. Military convoys are marked by the front and rear vehicle displaying a light or flag (blue for the lead vehicle, green for the rear vehicle).
I remember passing a military convoy which was driving down the slow lane of the M1, slower than normal slow lane traffic. I don't think there was anything like that bringing up the rear behind the Big Stuff. The escort was all at the front to clear the way...
And yet, there are "anonymous"[*] tankers running up and down the road network all day long that are basically "bombs on wheels".
* insomuch as most people just see a "tanker" and have no clue what is inside or, in some cases, what is not inside that makes it even more explosive. It's a testament to the drivers and the tanker manufactures that we don't have explosions on the roads with any frequency :-)
Drove into the base slowly as the entrance gate was up and there was nobody on sentry duty. After parking tried to find somebody on reception but gave up after 5 minutes with nobody responding.
A friend used to visit a "hybrid" military site where some surplus buildings (and some custom builts) were leased out to private firms - defence contractors but also private companies in sort-of-adjacent fields for whom having a discreet space on a secure site was deemed preferable and meant you didn't have to worry so much about protestors or activists compared with being on - say - a standard business park. No signs on the gates and the paper trail went a bit murky in terms of trying to work out who was there simply by examining business rates, or any other filed paperwork. On paper it was all military and who had a tenancy there was kept quiet.
It made the C-Suites happy that it was literally a criminal offence for protestors to be within half a mile of their buildings and that an incursion would be met with khaki uniforms rather than G4S. There was then the all-military inner-enclave which they never visited. During the week they'd have to sign in at the gatehouse, who would call the contact and the car would be monitored by CCTV driving to the right building and the contact would then confirm to the gatehouse they'd arrived. In-building security was the tenant's concern, but usually fully escorted as you'd expect.
On occasion they got called in on a weekend. It was not uncommon for the gatehouse to be unmanned, for them to drive the wrong side round the half-width barriers and announce themselves at the front door of their client... it was never quite clear whether the tenants realised their "secure" site was basically open for anyone to go for a drive round out of hours... obviously you could still get a gun pointed at you if you attracted enough attention, but it all sounded a bit lax.
There really are people who have the job of breaking into UK military bases. The CO will receive a note stating that on a particular date a certain named individual will attempt entry of their site avoiding the guard force etc. Every now and then a CO will be in their office when after a polite knock on the door their uninvited guest arrives, with or without armed escort, depending on whether they had beed caught or not.
"Immediately followed by car screeching to a halt and slowly reversing towards the by now tooled up with sub-machine gun officers"
Well, you got their attention. Mission accomplished, I say.
In rather less heavily armed circumstances ... travelling in places where English fluency was limited and our local-language fluency was pretty much non-existent beyond "please" and "thank you" ... being ready to settle up in a restaurant but our server seemed to have forgotten about us. Sooner or later we'd get tired of waiting and, as we'd call it, "make the universal sign", i.e. stand up. Never failed...
I was part of a team installing a helicopter simulator on the base and we worked silly hours to get access to the required areas when they were not being used by the Instructors. Finished one night at about 1am and was driving out to go back to my hotel when the nice chap at the gate pointed his Stirling at me which I took as a sign to stop. Apparently I had to sign out to show I was not drunk but as I tried to get out of the car he suggested in gentle tones that I move the car back behind the barrier.
I was very tired/flustered/deafened at this point and almost managed the feat but remodeled the front wing on the very substantial barrier support post
Maybe back then, but have you seen the training and paperwork required to allow a non-employee to use your ladder? You have no idea whether they've done a "how to use a ladder" course or a "working at heights" course. And think of the poor employee. He must not use a "strange" ladder as he and his employer can't be sure it's up to the proper standards required by H&S rules, unlike his own rickety old ladder provided by his employer for which he has all relevant training courses under his belt :-)
I used to work at a place with storage in the attic. The storage was about a metre higher than the exit of the lift, so there was a scissor lift for the remaining height. We had probably the world's most over the top Health and Safety person who insisted that it was dangerous and we'd all need to be trained on using it. Obviously this was hugely annoying, so a guy from one of the other IT groups did the training, got the key from security in the late morning and got a new key cut over lunch...
Maybe back then, but have you seen the training and paperwork required to allow a non-employee to use your ladder?
Ah! BT again.. I wish I'd kept their H&S edict that stated no person should attempt to climb a ladder before it had been securely attached at both top and bottom. Though to be fair, they did have a lot of accidents because ladder + telegraph pole was a tad hazardous.
Not IT but British Waterways' method for securing bat boxes high up in trees involved four people and two ladders.
To maintain three points of contact with the ladder you had to have a person up each ladder, one to hold the nail and the other to hit it with a hammer (plus a person to foot each ladder which does make sense). The last thing I'm going to do 20' up a ladder is allow someone else to aim a hammer at my fingers and thumb!
To be fair, BT does specify a better angle for their ladder than the fire brigade did, something like 4-1 rather than 5-1, that means the foot of the ladder could be in a tray of oil and it would still be safe.
I remember being taught how to do a clove-hitch in the classroom by making 2 loops then crossing them over but, during a practical, an instructor then pointing out that it would be difficult sliding that over a telephone pole!
(PO Telecoms apprenticeship, early 70s)
"making 2 loops then crossing them over"
Even in cases where that would be possible -- the canonical example is securing a boat to a bollard -- it's always struck me as a cumbersome way to go about it, trying to juggle both loops ("hitches") at once. Far easier to drop them over the bollard one at a time. The bollard secures the first hitch, and that hitch provides some strain relief, both of which make the second hitch easier to do.
Off course, a clove hitch isn't a particularly secure knot, so I don't think I'd use it to secure a boat in the first place...
...for Digital, back in the day. But the bit I worked for was the bit that had the support contract for Dell in the UK. So when I showed up on site, it was 'Hi, I'm Mr. Store from Dell'. I mostly worked on servers...
I worked in some interesting places... Special Branch offices, where I first encountered the concept of a server *built in* to a literal safe. Essex police, in multiple police stations fixing troublesome RAIDs. GCHQ, where the contents of my bag was checked before and and after I left site... no big deal, although _no_ hard disks that were replaced ever left the site! Couple of military sites also...
But the most paranoid security I ever encountered was at one of the shadier offices of the BT Research Establishment, at Martlesham Heath. That was the only place I wasn't even allowed *near* the server; I had to wait at reception, and the faulty server was eventually wheeled out to me, on a trolley, and there it was that I fixed it.
A former colleague used to have to maintain some communication antennas and associated gear for people who do not exist, at places that didn't appear on an Ordnance Survey map.
Not being on the map used to lead to some difficulty in actually finding the transmitter sites.
Fortunately one of the senior technicians had bought a set of old Soviet maps while at a conference in Moscow, and these showed the installations in some detail.
In the early days of networking, I had a gig at an MOD site in London, showing staff how to set up the relevant kit. Let them see how it all fitted together, then clean it up and make sure they could do it themselves.
The client had bought the server and workstations. They even arranged a car park space for me.
I was escorted EVERYWHERE, including to the Gents. The block had its own canteen, with a chap carving meat whilst wearing his toque.
The day went well, and we were paid through official channels.
About 15 years later I found out that the office block was home to MI6. I may have taught Q branch the delights of Microsoft Networks. :-)
great fun working for HM government, annoying squaddies and sailors who've been posted to guard rooms full of our stuff (and senior officers) "You cant go in there, its secret!" "yes we know.. we've the people installing it" was always a delightful conversation. but not for the 47th time..........
But we had one job to install <redacted> at <redacted> and its a 4hr drive there and 4 hrs back and theres no way we're staying overnight because the only hotel is a shitehole, and we'd have to spend 3 weeks arguing with the beancounters to get our money back.
So we finish the job, and its one of those 'all tools in, all tools out' kind of jobs, and we've have rolls of spanners, and boxes of screwdrivers all laid out, present and correct before we went in, but when we came out someone had an extra spanner in their roll... and we're like "Its not mine.. all mine are here"
Best option we came up with was that one of the squaddies was arsing about... the other option was that for the past 6 months some very expensive gear that went anywhere from zero feet to <redacted> feet had a spanner rolling around inside it.....
Oh and those military convoys on the M4 another commentard was on about are just for show... the real kit is on a backroad in a 4 ton bedford truck with a couple of squaddies sitting on it....
In a time before satnav I just entered the the wrong access road by mistake. It lead to a now infamous bay where there is a US base.
I spent several hours under the sun with a machine gun pointed at my face while cuban military meticulously searched our car and belongings and checked out paperwork with whoever was in charge to make sure we weren't spies or terrorist or something else they didn't fancy... yeah... not the stress-relieving days of vacations one hopes for.
Many years ago I was attending a meeting in the headquarters of the U.S. State Department in Washington. It was a very mundane meeting about international standardization of email. (I *said* it was years ago...) The conference room was just a short way down a corridor from the front lobby but there was still a lot of security such as colored lights indicating "visitors in the hall" and armed guard every so often.
For many years I worked in a place, not a government facility, where the "computer room" had doors that only opened if you peered wide-eyed at a small camera on the wall that photographed your retina and compared it with a database of authorized users. This thing was so inconvenient to use that I think it got replaced pretty quickly.
One day the Vice President of the United States visited our office. We had days of warning and some detailed instructions on what we could do. Nobody could enter or leave the building while he was there, and nobody could remain on the upper floors. Everybody had to be in the lobby where he was going to give a speech. And there were about six tall steely-faced guys with earpieces and bulgy jackets standing around the edges of the room, watching us.
"One day the Vice President of the United States visited our office."
Someone I know tells the story of the time a former president gave a speech at a venue where my friend was one of the managers. When he arrived at work that morning, he was greeted by name by Secret Service types who then asked a few pointed questions that made it clear they'd been doing their homework on him. They then informed him that he wouldn't have the use of his office for the day. It had what they had deemed a tactically important window, and so had been commandeered as a sniper post.
Sure this Very Important UK bunker has its own ladders?
A business I used to own had 12 foot ceilings, and when we had electricians or whatever come in they would use one of our ladders. They had their own on the van, but why would they bring one inside if we had one? The only time contractors used their own was if they needed to get on the roof.
I seem to remember reading somewhere that IBM had specific part numbers for various tools and ladders *required* for maintenance of their mainframes and that customers had to purchase these so that they were available to IBM engineers coming on-site to do maintenance work.
Failure to have the required maintenance tools == no IBM support. Failure to have the specific IBM ladder (not just any ladder) == no IBM support etc.
That kind of makes sense if you assume that IBM didn't want the liability of their employees using some random janky ladder, or if they were designed a bit differently to let the employee get as close as possible to what they were working on, had places to keep tools on the ladder, etc.
If you're buying a million dollar mainframe, it is difficult to quibble about paying $500 for a special ladder not that different from the $50 ladder at Lowes.
"some random janky ladder"
The very last court appearance from my forensic science days was a civil hearing from an event years earlier. Somebody had been hired to wash (no, I don't know why) a tiled roof. There was a wooden roof ladder of the sort that hooks onto the ridge that was too short to extend to the bottom of the roof. It was "extended" by being suspended on a rope from the chimney stack, and extended so part of it overhung the bottom of the roof. The guy stepped onto one of the overhanging rungs. It was a very home-made ladder the sides each had a very large knot between the same pair of rungs.
If you're ever in the Ottawa area and have a hankering to visit a place such as this week's story takes place in, there's the Diefenbunker. It was to serve as Canada's emergency seat of government should the Cold War turn hot, but is now decommissioned and open to the public. It's named for John Diefenbaker, the PM who had it built in the late 50s and early 60s. (The nickname was originally an Opposition insult.)
If you've ever toured the Churchill War Rooms in London, well, those were improvised at almost the last moment, in the basement of an existing government building. As the Wikipedia article puts it: "Although it is commonplace for present-day governments to operate such facilities, [1938] was the first time the British government had required one, and as such there was no precedent for how or where it should be built, or what it should contain."
The Diefenbunker, by contrast, was purpose-built, with by then two decades' worth of precedent to draw on, and a vastly more powerful threat to defend against.
Three things that struck me on my visit. First, the sheer hulking physicality of the place. It was designed to withstand a nuclear blast, with all that implies.
Related is the decontamination rigmarole that everyone, from the PM on down, would have had to go through on arrival, had the worst come to pass.
Last and most poignant: a row of small offices, each with maybe half a dozen desks, with signs on the doors: "Industry, Trade & Commerce" on one, and I forget the others. Whole government Ministries, each to be allotted one small room. That conveyed to me in a way nothing else had, the scope of the calamity these people were planning against.
If you're ever in the area, it's an ... impressive way to spend an afternoon.
Nice! I like it. But it wouldn't have flown.
1. I doubt many anglophones would get it. I had to look it up. ("Tiefen" = "depth(s)")
2. Not sure, but I suspect it was too soon after the War for politicians in an Allied country to get away with German-language defence puns :-/ Memories would have been too fresh back then
3. The term was originally intended to mock the PM; the closer to his name, the more effective the mockery
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