Earlier somewhere else I posted Duffel Blog post claiming that NORAD spends $231 billion tracking Santa on Christmas Eve. The post was funny and the imaginary description of everything they was a pretty good spoof on the military.
I chuckled.
Anyway, the truth is that the Santa tracking they do at Cheyenne Mountain costs the taxpayers nothing. The military people involved are all just volunteers and the electronics, phone service etc. are donated.
I wes stationed in Colorado Springs back in the day at Fort Carson, an army base. We had a senior NCO that had been assigned to work with the Air Force at Cheyenne Mountain and he had done a Christmas Eve there helping to track Santa.
He said it was a lot of fun and told me that it was one of those rare times in service life where everyone there was more or less an equal and everybody pitched in and had a lot of fun.
I believe he said he had been a staff sergeant at the time and that night he said that it was the first time he had been served coffee by a smiling lieutenant colonel. He had been manning a phone at the time.
This was back in the day when they didn't have the internet and a lot of other communication devices that they do now. It was pretty much a phone in thing.
A few year back I met an Air Force major that had been assigned a tour at Cheyenne Mountain when he was a captain. He told me he had intervened in a cheerful, good natured 'argument' over who's turn it was to answer the phones between a major and a sergeant.
He looked at the pair of them and stole a Dr Stangelove line when he looked at the pair of them and said that they couldn't fight there because it was a war room.
This doesn't mean that it's anarchy there, just that there's a lot of good natured work going on there. They're still service people.
It's interesting to note that it started by a misprint in a local paper. A Sears advertisement in the local paper had a call-in number whereby Santa would talk to children. The number printed was actually the number of the Cheyenne Mountain commanding officer, Colonel Harry Shoup. When Shoup got the first call he immediately ordered a couple of his people to start tracking Santa and answered kid's calls for the rest of the evening.
A couple of years later the Air Force started posting the Cheyenne Mountain facility number and volunteers manned the lines fielding calls to Santa for the kids. They have been doing it ever since.
Over time things have been updated. As phone service improved they started fielding calls from all over the country on an 800 number. Over time it spread to the internet. With the event of the internet kids can now follow Santa on his route around the world on the web. They can also call in.
The website is pretty educational in addition to being just plain fun for kids. They mark every place that Santa has stopped and if you click on one of his stops another window opens and gives the reader some information on the place. It's a pretty good geography lesson.
It's likely they will continue to do this until some whiny jerks invent a reason to complain and ruin another wonderful military tradition that has brought joy to many and cost none of us anything.
To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY
What is even funnier is that there are always people posting in Duffel Blog's comments who take everything written there, even the most absurd stuff, at face value and start screaming and complaining. I love the stories, but the comments are often better than the stories.
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