Wrinkly Bits
I was sitting here, minding my own business, watching a baseball game, Cardinals vs somebody. I am a Cardinals fan, and the score was 1-0, Cardinals, so I thought it was a good time to call one of my friends, but my iPhone didn’t want to cooperate, but I kept trying. All of a sudden, Cowboy Bob’s phone began to hyperventilate, and he received two phone calls within seconds of each other. First, from my son in Alaska: “Hey, Cowboy, is my mom all right?” which was interrupted by a call from my daughter in Idaho saying, “I just got an emergency call from my mom, what’s up?” My kids have both met and like Cowboy Bob, and although we met online and he has an axe, they know he’s not an axe murderer. Then my phone rang, a call from the local sheriff’s office and I heard a voice say, “What is your emergency?” but I couldn’t answer the phone. Then Cowboy Bob’s phone began to ring with an SOS message that I was in dire danger and might need medical attention. Nope, I was fine, except for a hangnail. All told, my emergency SOS system called my four emergency contacts six times. Six, that’s twenty-four calls, and the score was now 3-1 Cardinals.
What to do? I borrowed the cowboy’s phone and called my carrier, but since the cowboy uses a different carrier, the auto-operator did not understand why I was calling about a phone that was not in its system. By that time, I was shouting at the auto-operator who finally transferred me to someone who said he lived near Calcutta, India, and had no idea about Montana, cowboys, or baseball. He didn’t know how to stop the SOS messages and advised me to reboot my phone, but the SOS sprang into action and began calling my emergency contacts again.
About that time, the local Veteran’s Administration office called my phone, but of course, I couldn’t answer, and a few minutes later, the cowboy’s phone started flashing and buzzing, “Emergency Call,” and pretty soon, he was on the line with both the VA and the sheriff. My son called again, “Are you sure she is okay?” Cowboy Bob affirmed that I was fine, but that I had scorched the customer service rep in Calcutta with words he had never heard before.
My daughter texted, “Can’t you get this fixed?”
Cowboy Bob headed to the shop and found a ball-peen hammer and a vice and the SOS messaging ceased. The moral of this story is that the primitive use of a rock and a hard place solved the problem that millions of miles of fiber-optics could not solve.
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