That was interesting

This is almost the only way I would be interested in watching so I found it sort of amusing… On Sunday I was paid to watch the Super Bowl.

“Why?”, you ask.

My company is considered “critical infrastructure” and our product being functional during the Super Bowl was important enough to devote some extra resources to making sure nothing “bad happened”. I work on the Threat Intelligence team and we needed to “keep our eyes open” for possible threats to our assets before, during and after the Super Bowl.

Our team brought food and drink into the office and watched our cyber sources “with one eye” while the game was on a large monitor at the front of the office.

We had been looking for potential threats for months. While there was a few things of concern early on, in the final few days leading up to the event there was NSTR (Nothing Significant To Report) every day. I was a bit concerned it was “too quiet”* but as a friend of mine said on Twitter:

Last night, I saw a miracle. America, a land divided of many opinions, lifestyles, socioeconomic backgrounds, a land of the colored, the gay, the racist and the homophobes… people of such diversity all set aside their differences to celebrate the Patriots losing the Superbowl.


* The signal going dark for a while got us going for a bit but we quickly determined it had nothing to do with us and the stadium hadn’t been vaporized or anything.

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5 thoughts on “That was interesting

  1. I wish I were smarter/younger/more desirable so I could work wherever-it-is y’all work. When I was a vendor doing support during the Y2K insanity, all we had was a cardboard cutout figure of Chewbacca The Wookie as a Team Mascot and a tray of cheese-n-sausage which was devoured before I came off-watch. Sigh. Some people have all the fun.

  2. Patriots receiver Rob Gronkowski could have used some help. His home was burglarized during the game, including the theft of at least three firearms.

    • That’s sad. Sorry we couldn’t have helped. That sort of thing is well beyond our domain and ability.

    • Apparently he did not bolt down the safe.
      Years ago I read a book (“How to be safe from burglars” or something like that) written by a retired professional burglar. He mentioned that any safe weighing less than 800 pounds needs to be bolted to the house. I might raise that limit a bit, but the point was that anything light enough to be lifted, or dragged, by a couple of guys can’t just sit on the floor.

  3. I’ve been ‘paid’ to watch the Superbowl twice in my life. Both times while I was in the Army, so no OT pay, just part of the the job. Once back in the late 1990s, when I had overnight staff duty, and there wasn’t anything else on AFN (that was the year the Rams beat the Titans) and in 2010, when I was part of the night crew in the IJC JOC. That one we had the game on one of the big projector wall screens normally used (in the daytime) for briefings and such.

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