Which is irrelevant. If there’s an eemergency, they need to contact someone now, and may need some contact of some sort within minutes if not hours which is rather tricky with international calls and times.
It’s not always something medical, they just need someone they can get in touch with. That person can get in touch with whomever you need. Get a friend and give them a list of emergency numbers for family or whatever back in Australia. That friend doesn’t need power of attourney or any such thing.
[QUOTE=Jackmannii]
Oh really? (moment of silence here for our Zimbabwean visitors). Even visiting Brits may enjoy our less constipated libel laws and restrictions on reporting legal proceedings.
[/QUOTE]
Yes, of course we can point to examples where rights are abused or trampled (I think it actually happens everywhere, to some extent) - but that’s not really what I’m talking about - it was more a case of someone appearing to be under the impression that foreign visitors would only have rights if they were granted by the USA on entry, whereas in fact the USA, as a UN member state, is supposed to recognise that they already have basic human rights - the rights aren’t handed out as a hospitality package .
[QUOTE=Polycarp]
Gee, John, you know, other countries do fly aeroplanes too. :rolleyes:
[/QUOTE]
I would consider an emergency contact someone who could come and collect me from the hospital or police station. An eighteen hour plane ride kind of puts a kink in that.
[QUOTE=An Gadaí]
It’s from a Simpsons episode. Bart wins an elephant as a goofy prize in a radio contest. They say he can’t have the elephant but he keeps demanding it, and demanding it and eventually he gets it. How do you know I’m Fenian?
[/QUOTE]
Missed that episode, I guess.
And I assumed the fenian bit since I lived in Londonderry for 3 years as a child: yes LONDONderry.
(P.S. My wife is catholic and my kids are going to a catholic school. Please don’t think I meant any harm by that remark.)
[QUOTE=Caffeine.addict]
That being said, does anyone know what the breakdown of posters is by nationality?
[/QUOTE]
In another thread recently I saw a link to this site profile, although I have no idea if it’s accurate or not. When you click on More Info under the “Alexa graph” it shows that 63% of straightdope.com users are in the US. 5.4% are in Canada, 5.3% in the UK.
If it is accurate, then I suppose it doesn’t necessarily mirror the profile of those who actually post here.
[QUOTE=Maus Magill]
I would consider an emergency contact someone who could come and collect me from the hospital or police station. An eighteen hour plane ride kind of puts a kink in that.
[/QUOTE]
Yes, that’s the type of thing I was thinking about. Without knowing specifically what the emergency contact is supposed to do, it’s hard to judge whether you need someone in country or not. I can imagine circumstances where someone being outside the country would be a problem. And, of course, if you do need to get in touch with relatives overseas, then the local contact can do that.
But some people don’t HAVE local contacts. When I moved to the US last fall I didn’t know anyone here. Maybe I should have put down http://boards.straightdope.com as my emergency number?
[QUOTE=HazelNutCoffee]
But some people don’t HAVE local contacts. When I moved to the US last fall I didn’t know anyone here. Maybe I should have put down http://boards.straightdope.com as my emergency number?
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=HazelNutCoffee]
But some people don’t HAVE local contacts. When I moved to the US last fall I didn’t know anyone here. Maybe I should have put down http://boards.straightdope.com as my emergency number?
[/QUOTE]
What? You mean you’re not going to grab a random stranger and ask them if they’ll be your emergency contact?
I think that’s less of an issue of your employer being US-centric, and more of them assuming that a single person wouldn’t move to a foreign country without knowing anyone there.
I think the Op has a point.
Only 63% of straight dope users are apparently from the US
Canada & the UK represent the largest foreign contingents at about 5% each.
It is interesting that 64% of the traffic is for the boards and only 36% the home site.
Sorry for the statistics, but mentioning location in many posts makes sense. It is like the computer questions about something not working on the Internet and not mentioning the Op System and what browser is in use. It helps to include basic information in many questions.
Jim
ETA: **Eleanor of Aquitaine ** forgive me, I missed your post.
[Quote=chowder]
Nah, it’s in the same neck of the woods as Naaarridge. Assuming you meant Ipswich
[/Quote]
[QUOTE=John Mace]
Massachusetts. But, the poster is on the other side of the pond, in the original Ipswitch.
[/QUOTE]
Thus did my joke fail twice. Not only did I misspell “Ipswich”, but I stuck the American one in the wrong state.
I’ll still stick with the idea that it’s not unreasonable to assume that a person would have an emergency contact within 10,000 miles (16093.44 km).
[QUOTE=What Exit?]
I think the Op has a point.
Only 63% of straight dope users are apparently from the US
[/QUOTE] Only? That’s almost the couple portion of a date with a third wheel.
[QUOTE=Maus Magill]
I would consider an emergency contact someone who could come and collect me from the hospital or police station. An eighteen hour plane ride kind of puts a kink in that.
[/QUOTE]
Maybe you should avoid situations that may lead to being picked up from the police station, then. If I’m in good enough health to be picked up from the hospital, I’m in good enough health to make the phone call myself… I don’t need the university to make it for me! And I’d say that 99% of the foreign students in US universities got there without knowing anybody. It was the case for 100% of the ones I met (I happened to have relatives in town but didn’t know it and anyway they were nice but quite useless).
[QUOTE=John Mace]
I can actually see where that might make sense. In an emergency situation, they may need to get in touch with someone who is in the US. Granted, there are times when an international location may be closer than one in the US, but generally that wouldn’t be the case, and it wasn’t in yours.
[/QUOTE]
So what is a newly-arriving international graduate student supposed to do for an emergency contact number? Prowl the streets of Baltimore asking random strangers if they are willing to be his new friend?
There were never any instructions that the emergency contact person needed to be in the United States. No-one ever said to me that i should try and find a local contact. They were happy to copy down the name and (foreign) address of my overseas contact, and plug in the overseas phone number. The only problem was that no-one had thought to leave enough spaces in the phone number section of the database to cope with foreign numbers.
I actually don’t attribute this to any particular parochialism. I blame mere incompetence. My university might have world-class scholars, doctors, etc., but its administrative efficiency would be considered poor even by DMV standards.
Well, then they’d be idiots, wouldn’t they?
I can think of plenty of reasons why someone would move to a foreign country without knowing anyone who lived there. Grad students come to the US all the time for grad school without knowing anyone. People in business jump at the chance to work in their company’s US offices for a few years, and may not actually know anyone living in the states. The huddled masses from underdeveloped countries who see America as a beacon of opportunity have always been willing to move here without knowing a soul.
And i’m not sure why the assumption is that the emergency contact needs to be someone who lives nearby. For me, the emergency contact is the person who i would want to be informed first if anything happened to me. Right now, that’s my wife, and it doesn’t matter if she’s just around the corner or on the other side of the world. Before i got married, it was my parents.
