©1 February 2025 Levite
http://themediadesk
1.
Of course I had to put up with some light kidding, and a bit of jealousy, and even a few questions from some members of the County Board about both my being on TV, and the reason for it. But, we didn't hide anything, we didn't deny anything, and we answered all questions and concerns as completely and honestly as we could.
Including the questions by a very devoutly religious board member who thought that everything paranormal was satanic and that, somehow, I was inviting demons to come take root in Suffolk County.
I didn't get upset, I didn't call them names or make fun of their beliefs, I simply asked him a question.
"Excuse me, sir. Do you remember the part where Jesus walked on the water?"
"Of course. One of the accounts is in Matthew Fourteen."
"Yes, the disiples thought He was a ghost, and He didn't say that those do not exist." The gentleman was about to interrupt me, but I raised a finger and stopped him. "I've got one more point. After the Resurrection, the passage in Luke, when He appears in the locked room to them. What did Jesus say about ghosts?"
They didn't answer right away, and I didn't help them at all. "I remember the passage. He said that spirits do not have flesh and bones. As He did."
"Exactly. If anybody would know whether such things are real, He would, right? By definition, we do not live in a Mundane World, there are angels, and other 'things', here, right?"
"Yes. But we aren't supposed to invoke spirits."
"How is determining whether something is a misinterpreted radio signal, or a deliberate hoax, or even a paranormal manifestation if it is one, invoking a spirit? And not everything I have investigated is a spirit. Remember what may be African Wild Dogs in the Pine Barrens, and the high school history project."
He stood and stared at me with totally cold eyes. "Clearly I underestimated you Detective."
"And I've got one other question."
"All right," he said.
"If it wasn't Samuel. Then what did the Witch of Endor call up for King Saul? He came up, they recognized each other, and Samuel spoke a prophecy that came true."
"I've wondered about that myself."
"Maybe you'd like to accompany me sometime to look into some of the reports that come in."
"No, thank you. But no." He shook his head. "Detective, if I witnessed some of the things that I've heard you talk about, I'd never be able to sleep again."
"Then I will handle these cases, and you can go back to selling lawn equipment, and we'll both be happy. OK?"
He thought about it for a second. "Yes. And if you ever need anything for your lawn, come see me."
"First, I'd need a yard to need something for."
2.
It wasn't long after that delightful exchange that a case arrived from another County Agency. And it was the County Board that suggested they bring it to me stating that I had previous experience with both computer issues and unusual cases. I don't know if it was the lawncare guy that had the idea or not.
One of the projects the County is involved in is various forms of transportation for our senior citizens and those who are disabled or have other specialized needs.
There are taxis and buses and door to door services and so on.
And then they tried a pilot program of a variable bus schedule to run between several of the larger residences and the more popular destinations. It was a combination of a dedicated schedule with a set route, and an at need service that could respond in a reasonable period of time to offer them a ride to wherever they needed to go that was somewhat close to the bus's route.
The route was computer controlled with input from a set of dispatchers in the main county office who took calls and messages about those that needed the service. The computer used GPS to route the buses along the best path to avoid congestion while still traveling with some good efficiency.
It looked good on paper, and several of the other state and county agencies, as well as a handful of private and charitable programs that worked with that clientele bought into it, and a trial run began.
I even remember seeing one of the new buses, with its eye catching wrap and informative wording stopping by the main building of my apartment complex a few times.
For a few months, it had gone reasonably well. There were a few hiccoughs in the system, as with anything, but then things really went haywire and one of the drivers even told a radio station news reporter that the new route had him going in circles for twenty minutes to addresses that didn't exist, while several old ladies were waiting across town.
Another bus was routed down a dead end road out by the Roanoke Barge wrecks along the North Beach to pick up a fictitious passenger, and he had to back out to where he could turn around safely.
The Board Committee that was overseeing the project had enough when another bus was sent on a wild goose chase, with nobody on board, to end up in the bus parking at Kennedy Airport to pick up passengers that didn't exist. A hundred and forty mile round trip that took about three hours out of the bus's regular day.
I read through the dispatch logs for the airport bus. The order had come from the main office. Except nobody there said they did it, and, from what I could tell, nobody did.
Each dispatcher has a code they used when they put in a request for a bus, or taxi, or whatever. If grandma called for a ride to the doctor and dispatcher 132 was on duty, the request had number 132 at the end of the entry for where and when the van would pick her up and drop her off. If on the way home, grandma needed to stop and get a prescription filled, the driver called in and told them. If dispatcher 93 was the one that got the call, that alteration to the route was entered with that number on its time stamp. Most calls were put in at least a day ahead of time, and the routes for that day were drawn up. The incoming calls and messages were then stored to establish a pattern for future reference.
The same went for the new adjustable route. Except the trip to JFK, and the one out to the Barges had totally fictitious numbers on them. Whoever had sent the buses out knew the system well enough to fake the IDs, and then added the bogus trips to the routing for that day. And it had to have been added between the route being created the previous evening once the route was finalized and the next morning when the driver came to work and printed their route for the day. And then at nine AM, after dropping several seniors off at their destination, the driver headed for the airport.
Another call that sent three different vehicles to the same address within minutes of each other, where nobody needed a ride that is, had a real call sign. Except the dispatcher that used that number was on a cruise and couldn't have entered the dispatches even if they had wanted to.
The system that controlled the buses and vans was as secure as anything really can be, and access to the system from outside was all but impossible. It really appeared that somebody was playing a prank on the senior taxi service, and it looked like they were getting away with it.
I sat in the control room and watched as calls and messages came in, both for the regular vans, and special needs vehicles. They were all for later that week, and as the requests came in and the tickets entered, the computer assigned vehicles and drivers to various riders and destinations.
Usually there were enough cars and vans and buses to handle everything. Some days, if there was an unusually heavy demand, such as during Covid for doctor's visits, the County would call in everybody from volunteers through the various agencies, or even temporary workers to cover. But usually, there was enough wheels and drivers to meet the need.
Until a bus spent three hours driving to the other end of the Island for no reason.
I spent two days in the dispatch center. Then I drove a van to pick up an elderly couple and take them to the senior center. Then I took a chatty lady to her eye doctor appointment, and later took her home. And so on. All of my calls were for actual riders and real destinations.
The next day I looked through the other dispatches orders with the shift supervisor, and we found something.
"This one, no ID," she said and pointed to a line for one of the vans.
The van was to report to an address in an industrial park in Hauppauge on the far Western end of the county. The only thing is said about passengers was that there were three of them. For special equipment, it said 'walker'. But there was no dispatcher number. She quickly checked the log of incoming requests, didn't find it, and used her override code to cancel the request.
"I was here on Tuesday when they were building today's route, and it says this came in while I was here..." I compared the time and date on the request. "Look at this," I said to the supervisor.
"One seventeen PM. We use the military clock. That should be thirteen seventeen." She answered.
I was already going back through the other mystery dispatches and saw that the majority, but not all of them, had either the time when the request came in as AM or PM, but not all did. A couple of them, including the one that went to see the barge wrecks, said "AH" for the times. I asked the supervisor what that meant.
"We used to use that, years ago. I remember when I first started we had an answering machine that we'd check in the morning, It was turned on when we left for the day. Those requests were tagged with 'after hours' for when the request came in, because sometimes the machine wouldn't have the correct time on it."
"So these requests are in an outdated style."
She nodded, "yes. Most of the new dispatchers wouldn't know about that. The voice mail we have now has a good time and date tag on it."
I had an idea, "Where and how are the completed schedules stored between when the routes for the next day are approved and the driver gets it in the morning?"
The supervisor brought up a screen on the monitor. "Once the schedule is full, including a lunch break and all that. It is locked and then transferred to pending dispatch, where it is assigned to a driver and a vehicle that is on duty that day."
"But it is still on the server."
"Yes, all of this is on our server. It never goes outside. Drivers from outside remote centers have to log in to get their orders for the day, then they can print it or download it. Some even have it sent to their phone so their GPS can tell them where to go."
"But it is here, it's not uploaded to the cloud, or the central server farm or mainframe?"
"No. It's on our server here," she pointed down the hall. "About once a quarter we upload the dispatch records to be stored off site. Anything active is here."
"What else is on that server?"
And that question solved the case.
We didn't have to get permission from either the President, or the Pope, but just about everybody else in the State of New York to see what was running on the server, and when.
But once we did, we got to sit and be bored and watch the server usage report for an hour.
"It's here, I know it, but we've got to find it. We've got to narrow it down," I said. "You finalize the schedule when? About four, sixteen hundred?" She nodded. "And they pick them up in the morning, oh six hundred, or so." She nodded again. "OK, let's work backward from, maybe five in the morning."
She did some typing and clicking and then the screen changed to the server traffic at five that morning.
"I don't see anything unusual," she said after a few minutes, "back another hour."
"That's more of the same," I said as the list of programs and operations looked very similar to the other one.
"Three AM." Then, "Two."
"What's that? TRNDOPSIMST?" I asked as something different appeared on the screen, and the amount of system resources it was using was significant.
"I'm not sure, give me a second." She changed screens to a program registry. "There it is."
"Senior Transportation Dispatch Operations Training Simulation." I read off the description.
"We haven't used that in a dozen years, why is it running? Why is it even still here?" The supervisor said.
"It's in the same directory as the approved dispatch orders," I looked at the data we had, "maybe somehow it is dropping training tickets into real dispatches."
"I guess it's possible. This all started when we moved the approved orders into this directory."
"Can you move them back?"
"That might get complicated, I'll see if they can move the simulator to archive. I know they probably saved it just in case we ever needed it again. But now, it'd be so outdated we'd never be able to use it, it'd cost more to update it than it would to get a new training program."
The tech guy said he'd move it to the county archive just based on her word. And they'd get permission to leave it there later.
I kept in touch with the supervisor for awhile and other than the usual typos on addresses and somebody putting down 930 instead of 830, everything was normal.
"Nobody's called asking if they were really supposed to take the Ferry across the Sound," the supervisor said.
So, I began to consider the case closed.
3.
The office had been getting calls from citizens that wanted me to come out to their house to investigate their ghost.
Our receptionist, and whoever else has answered those sorts of calls tells them that I am dedicated to investigating issues in public owned facilities. Such as County Buildings, State Parks, and other issues that could affect the public as approved by the Sheriff.
I got a list of reputable paranormal investigators from the group that had been looking into the Evans's building. And after I talked with those individuals and groups, and crossed a couple of them off the list as somebody that was looking to start their own TV show or something, I gave the list to everybody that dealt with those phone calls to refer people to that asked if we knew somebody that could come out.
And there was still the occasional media interview that I accepted, and a lot more that I either declined or sent a very carefully written bio and press release to.
One that I accepted was with a women's interest website and podcast.
The owner of the site was more interested in my becoming a detective than she was with the unusual and paranormal cases, but she knew that her listeners on the podcast would be fascinated by it, so we spent a good amount of time discussing both. Which I was fine with because it meant my having to discuss my private life took less than five minutes.
Which I was glad to do.
At the end of the just over forty-five minute interview and discussion she asked me if there was anything I'd like to say to her dedicated audience of mostly younger women and girls.
I knew the question was coming, she had told me previously that she always asks it, and asks it in that way. So I had had a day or so to think about it. And I had an answer.
"Just that your life may not go as you planned. When I was a child, I wanted to be a nurse. That's what I thought I'd do. A friend of mine's mother was a nurse, and I thought that was the best job ever. I even volunteered at the hospital when I was in high school. But I wasn't very good at some of the things you have to learn, and some of the things you have to do. So I kind of drifted between ideas for awhile. And then I found myself working during the summer for the local police. And it was interesting, and I was good at it. So I started taking classes, and changed departments, and then, well, a few years later, here I am. I love what I do, and I am enjoying the challenges that the special cases I am assigned to, or even allowed to pursue, present to me."
"That's wonderful." She said when I took a breath.
"So I'd like to say to those listening to not be overly surprised if your life takes a turn along a path that you didn't anticipate. Go with it, at least for a little while, and just see. It may work out. Or it may lead you into something totally unexpected. And just maybe, it'll be what makes you happiest. Which reminds me of my favorite JFK quote: 'Happiness is the full use of one's talents along lines of excellence.'"
"That is a wonderful way to end this segment. Thank you Detective Elaine."
-end bus-
[NOTE: The above story were written as adventure fiction, and is to be taken as such. While most of the features of Long Island exist, including their Senior Citizen transportation service, the rest of the setting is fictional.
Thank you, Dr. Leftover, TheMediaDesk.com]
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