The time my dispatcher thought we were experiencing a terrorist attack

Posted by Ndog4664@reddit | talesfromtechsupport | View on Reddit | 30 comments

A bonus story for today but going to be vague. won't get in trouble if im not but still probably a good thing if im vague.

So after some of the terrorist attacks in the early 2000, my company contracted a big aerospace company to build a system to automatically detect bio weapons. Said system is very expensive and requires a lot of maintenance and has multiple people monitoring it remotely.

One day my dispatcher received a call from a remote monitoring site saying that we need to check one of our machines because it's retesting a sample. My poor dispatcher interpreted this that it has detected something and being the only one on my shift trained for that system they called my cellphone directly. Dispatch doesn't know our cells because we have radios. So they got management to call me because no one wanted to talk about this over the radio. Was given direct orders to tell no one and go immediately to the machine. I arrive at the machine with everything running fine with no fault lights. So I logged in. The issue, a bad test tube. This machine has multiple so if it fails to get a "false" but also fails to get "positive" it will retest with a new tub. Nothing major, it just runs another test, the test do take awhile though so i got to sit and watch a screen. Did call dispatch back though and told them we are not under attack so they can calm down.was very over dramatic.