DatyFour, Another Ordinary Day For Oscar
Monday morning, Oscar Jamerson stopped off at Starbucks for a Latte on his way to the office in Canary Wharf, he wasn't sure why he did this but he did it every weekday morning, he really prefers tea if the truth be known.
In his office he locked the door before, he switched on a bank of electrical equipment. Several screens lit up immediately but he finished off his coffee as he waited for everything else to finish booting up.
He started to check his email but it was still coming in, loads of the stuff, he would let the filters do there work first. He looked round to another light blue screen, he could see instantly there was nothing new on facebook, not since he had left home anyway. Another screen was now showing world news and he turned up the volume slightly, apparently Man U should have had a penalty, nothing new there either.
Everything was just how it usually was, his email was now in and sorted, he opened his calender, he had one meeting today after lunch and an office safety meeting tomorrow afternoon, that was it for the week. Could he cope with all the excitement.
The last of the computers completed its start up and everything was now up and on line and updating after the weekend.
The office was just the right size for about half of the amount equipment crammed in there and most of it was at least ten years out of date.
Oscar worked for for a department, that he assumed was a government department but he had never been sure. He was paid a reasonable good civil servants salary for what he did and what he did do, was monitor for anything unusual. He had been doing this for about seventeen years and although he had often found unusual things to report, he rarely found anything interesting.
At the end of the nineties there had been eight of them doing the same job, with identical offices all along the corridor, now there was only Oscar left. The others had all been older than Oscar, and had gradually retired over the last seven years, never to be replaced. Oscar had been the last new recruit and had been considerably younger than the others, not that that made much difference as there had never been much communication between than and absolutely no socialising.
When Oscar had been approached by the department at the computer systems company where he was then working, the offer to work for them seemed to good to turn down. From the job description Oscar had imagined working on the X-Files or for SETI, searching for alien life forms but no, he was monitoring, TV and Radio broadcasts, phone calls and emails, anything sent electrically. He was also monitoring Satellites and CCTV, web sites and auction sites, forums, social networks and blogs.
He didn't actually watch, read and listen to everything, well not much, a large computer on the floor below did all that, it sifted through and filtered all this traffic, before sending its findings to Oscar.
A very similar computer on the floor of another building somewhere in London was doing something very similar but looking for terrorist activity. Another very similar computer on the floor of another building somewhere else in London was doing something very similar as well but looking for criminal activity and fraud. Both these computer had considerably more staff working for them, twenty four hour a day.
The filters used by the computer had become more and more sophisticated over the year and the amount of unusual activity sent to Oscar to evaluate had become less and less. What he did get, he decided if it was worthwhile perusing or worth binning. If in Oscars opinion something was worth perusing, the only thing he had to do next, was decided who to pass the information on to. Depending upon the type abnormality found, Oscar would forward the information to the relevant person and if there wasn't a relevant person, it want to his supervisor, Teddy Bradshaw.
Over the years, it had been mainly, UFO sightings, alien abductions, sea monster, people using alien technology, etc, plus meteor impacts, unexplained weather, any sort of thing vanishing over night and so on. Now the computer with new software, by cross referencing with other computers it could could sort fact from fiction.
Top of the list today was a meteor impact in Finland followed by a woman in Yorkshire who seen a bright flash and two people appear holding a coffee pot. Oscar passed on the information about the meteor impact in Finland to the to the relevant person, perhaps this person would then go find the meteor and take it for examination, he didn't really know.
He though he would handle the other one himself, this definitely wasn't, Torchwood or Men in Black.
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