Send help... maybe

A year or two ago, I set up a personal safety alert on my phone that I could activate when I was in trouble. It would send a picture from my front and rear cameras, my location coordinates and a recording link where the phone would record for a few minutes after I pressed the help key combination. All of this would be parceled up and sent to my darling’s phone.

I’m aware that since he never checks his text messages, or even knows how, that the plaintive cry for help would go unanswered. Whatever fate was befalling me would continue to do so without intervention. But still. When the police pulled my dismembered and horrifically abused body from whichever water course it had been weighted down in, THEY would get around to checking my incoming and outgoing phone messages and wah-lah! My killer may or may not be caught.

All of this magic was also dependent on me remembering the “special combination” required to trigger the emergency warnings in the first place. A remote hope indeed for someone who gets distracted walking into the kitchen for… well… whatever reason I walked into the kitchen for.

To tell the truth, I’d forgotten that this special system had even been set up on my phone. There’s still a faint hope that in the grip of a madman, I’d fumble my phone out of my pocket, remember this was set up AND remember the combination to activate it, but that hope is spinning-head and vertigo faint.

Tonight, I activated it.

Before you express any concern (and to prompt you that this would be the place to do that if you’re having trouble getting in touch with your emotions) I’m fine. I’m still confused as to what the key combination is, but nothing happened to warrant the call out for help at all.

I did, however, discover a fatal flaw in my plan.

When setting up said message, the phone asked me for an emergency contact to call. Of course, my darling topped the list, but highly sensitive to his special needs in relation to txt and pxt messaging, I helpfully set the call up to go straight to our home phone. Yes, that’s right. The landline. Just about the only thing in our house that plugs into a wall but ISN’T capable of receiving a message.

It goes without saying, I’ve now disabled the whole thing. The criminal element has triumphed yet again.

If you’d like to read a free short story that leads into a longer novel where the criminal underbelly may or may not triumph, then please click on the cover below to download my new short-short, Dead as a Dodo.

This is the first outing in my new Birdman Series and is short, sharp, and succinct, just like a drive-by shooting.

The first novel will follow along shortly, so in the meantime here’s a pretty cover:

(and if you’re still having trouble getting in touch with your emotions, here’s the bit where you go oooh and aaaah!)