The Madness Of The Hunt

There’s a moment in every deep-dive—somewhere between the INVITE and the CANCEL, between the good calls and the ones that never should have connected—where the mind starts to slip.

Not in a dramatic way. Nothing poetic. Just a slow erosion of the normal boundaries that separate man from machine, operator from signal.

At first, you’re just following a call. It starts as a simple trace—where did it go, what did it do, why did it die? But then the patterns emerge. A call rings once, twice, voicemail. Another rings twice, transfers. Another never really connects, but reports that it did. And suddenly, you're not just looking at calls anymore.

You’re looking at behavior.

And that’s where the trouble starts.

The Psychology of the Hunt

A normal person looks at a list of calls and sees phone numbers, timestamps, durations—the static metadata of telecom.

I see something else.

I see the calls that should have failed but didn’t. The ones that shouldn’t have connected, but found a way. The voicemails that picked up a half-second too late. The transfers that weren’t meant to happen. I see patterns in the noise, stories in the packets.

At some point, the lines blur.

I’ll be following a call trace, and it stops being about SIP and starts feeling like something alive. Like the network isn’t just moving packets but making choices. There’s no intelligence here, no ghosts in the machine—just the sheer complexity of a system so vast and layered that it starts to look like something more than it is.

And yet, I keep chasing.

Because I have to.

The Fine Line Between Forensics and Madness

Telco forensics is like staring at shadows long enough that you start to see shapes.

A single packet out of place isn’t just an error—it’s an artifact of something larger. A missing 180 Ringing, a malformed 486 Busy Here, a dropped 200 OK—these aren’t just problems to fix. They’re footprints. Traces of something else happening upstream, or downstream, or somewhere so buried in the system that the only way to find it is to keep looking until your mind starts filling in the gaps on its own.

And that’s the real danger.

It’s not the work itself—it’s what the work does to you.

The creeping paranoia. The sense that every call trace is connected. That if you just pull one more packet, filter one more layer, follow one more leg of the call, you’ll find the thing hiding underneath it all.

Of course, that’s not how it works. There’s always another call, always another capture, always one more anomaly that doesn’t fit the pattern.

And so you keep going.

The Loop That Never Ends

There is no finish line in this kind of work.

For every problem solved, there’s another lurking just beneath it. Every trace opens a new question. Every clean call is just another control case to measure against the ones that aren’t. The line between a perfect call and a failed one is thinner than people realize—sometimes measured in milliseconds, sometimes in nothing at all.

So you keep chasing.

Not because you want to.

But because, at some point, you forgot how to stop.

--The Truth Hurts
-Bryan