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Volunteers will answer 70,000 calls and 12,000 emails today. All because a department store got a number wrong.
5.00pm, 24 Dec 2013
25.9k
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ALL DAY TODAY excited children, and more than a few adults, will check on the status of Santa.
Services across the world promise to track the man in red on his flight from the North Pole.
The most well-known is the NORAD Santa-Tracker, which every year sees the North American Aerospace Defense Command, a brand of the federal US government, track the presents delivered by Saint Nick.
But why is an agency assigned to protect US airspace bothering with a man in a red suit who brings toys to kids?
It all started with a wrong number.
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Santa-line
In 1955, US Department store Sears printed a Christmas Eve ad in a Colorado Springs newspaper for a hotline that allowed children to talk to Santa.
(Wikimedia Commons/NORAD)
Except, they printed the number wrong, mistakenly giving out the number for what was then a regional base for CONAD, the precursor to NORAD.
At CONAD, Colonel Harry Shoup was handed the phone after a young girl had asked a number of times for Santa. As the young girl became more and more upset, Shoup began to play along.
As more calls came in, Shoup told his staff to provide a location for Santa’s sleigh.
From then, a tradition was born and a host of media used.
In 1997, the website was launched, bringing the largely-US tradition to the world.
The programme is run by volunteers who, on Christmas Eve alone, answer 12,000 emails and more than 70,000 telephone calls from more than two hundred countries and territories.
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I can’t wait to get out of this kip, maybe go to a country where good news feels good, instead of this hole where good news is nothing more than propaganda for the sheepies
I wouldn’t buy a used car off him. Everything is looking rosy, except we owe around 200 billion and are still borrowing about 9 billion a year. But if they still want to give it to us we’ll take it.
So what! Massive money printing and zero interest rates is forcing investors to invest in junk bonds like ours to get any sort of return coupled with Dragi saying he’d intervene if countries were close to default is pushing down interest rates. Greece’s bonds are also around 3.6% Ffs and they defaulted to the tune of 100bn! The fact of the matter is austerity and Keynesianism for the banks has increased debt and risk in the world economy, setting us up for a monster crash bigger than 2007! What will that mean for us? Confiscation of savings and destruction of pensions, further collapse in income and ever widening wealth and income gaps. Whupdedoo!
I think as a country we need to decide what the bottom is in terms of support. It seems we just can’t decide how far left we are trying to go. Until then people will always feel hard done by.
I don’t judge my economy on how good our bond yields are or how many new McJobs have been created. I judge it on how well the state cares for kids with special needs or how many homeless I see sleeping in doorways in Dublin’s business district every morning.
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