When did you (or SYK) use a cel in an emergency?

In My Humble Opinion
1

In the cel phone “debate”, someone always says, “what if there’s an emergency?”

I’d like to hear anyone (or someone you know) who had a real emergency where a cel phone made a difference.

Here’s something that would be disqualified (this is true): in high school, I was in a car that flipped over and a couple people were throws from the car and obviously hurt. We went to the nearest house and callled 911. No one needed a cel phone.

Or if your mom called you to tell you your grandmother died. Again, not an emergency. Something that could have waited till later.

Not an emergency: running out of gas.

Not an emergency: getting lost.

I’m not asking for your opinions about how the convenience is worth it. Where did your cel phone actually help in an emergency, or a story you know first hand.

Or do you consider getting lost an “emergency” instead of an “inconvenience”.

2

It’s “cell”. Not “cel”.

3

Well, when I broke my leg in a blinding rainstorm two years ago, I had to send my then-eight year old son across the street to get the neighbors. He was scared, but he did it anyway. While he was gone, I remembered that I had my phone in a pocket I could get to, and I called 911 for myself.

Had my neighbors not been home and I not had my cell phone, I would have been in serious trouble. This was not the sort of break I could have hobbled inside to get to the landline with.

4

About eight years ago, I flipped my car on black ice on the parkway. Spectacularly, by the way. I wish someone got film of it. After I crawled out of the car, I asked the bystanders to borrow a cell phone to call my parents. All five people whipped out their cell phones. I offered money to the person whose phone I used (cell phone calls were more expensive back then), but they refused. I think they were happy that someone needed to use the phone in an emergency so they could justify the expense.

5

Cowgirl: still, your son would have had the neighbors call, so it wasn’t actually essential.

Dewey: you crawled out of the car and you were calling your parents? What was the emergency?

Munch: cite? I always though “cel” or “cell” was an abbreviation for “cellular” and I didn’t think there was an official one.

I don’t mean this to sound nit picky. People seem to think that there are situations where the phone was needed in an emergency, but I haven’t heard too many cases where an available land line wouldn’t have done the job just as well. Or that the phone just made things more convenient (dewey calling his parents. it didn’t really save his life or anything, though).

6

While swapping out a semi-working phone for a working phone, I tried the ‘unserviced’ one, and 911 worked just fine. No other number did.

My cell phone was a great help on 9/11/2001; with that and the internet I was able to pass a lot of messages back and forth about people being safe and accounted for (rather than use the company phone for long distance charges). Emergency for a few of them, though no life and death timing matters were involved, thankfully.

Most of my emergency uses have been “inconvenienced” uses:

Stranded by the side of the road, miles away from a regular phone, someone stopped and loaned me their phone to call AAA, saving me from flagging down a random tow truck or a taxi cab to get me to a phone and back. (This was the second time the timing belt had blown, the first time I had done the taxi/payphone trip)

Calling FHP to report people driving on the wrong side of the road/drunkenly/etc. Calling FHP to report debris in the road (cement bags, animals, furniture) or serious accidents (cars on fire, etc).

7

I’ve called 911 all of 3 times in my life, all on my cell (I’ve never had to call from a land line).

The latest time happened only 2 days ago. I was behind a red firebird that was all over the road; braking, weaving about the lanes (this was at 2 am so there was little traffic). I don’t normally bother (I was safely behind them) but when they nearly clipped an island I called 911 to report them. I was able to give them a real time account of what they were doing and exactly the streets we were passing.

Before that, I was on the highway and I had passed 2 cars road raging against each other (a mini van was blocking the left lane and STOPPED while traffic was moving at 120 km/h). He was trying to cause the car behind him to crash. After I passed (about 500 meters or so away) I watched as the car lost it and spun out into the rail guard. I was too far away to stop to help and the mini-van sped off. I followed while calling *OPP (Ontario Provincial Police handle highway emergencies). I was only able to get a partial plate since he was weaving in traffic and I was unable to follow.

The time before that, on my very first cell phone, I witnessed a car packed with people flip on it’s side in the middle of winter. Me and half a dozen other cars stopped to pull people out (very bad winter, the ambulance was delayed more than 45 minutes). I called 911 while running to the vehicle.

8

My wife rode out on her mountain bike the other day, got a quarter mile or so down our road, hit a rock, and went over her handlebars, cracking her shoulder painfully. She called me on her cell phone, I went down, picked her up and took her to the ER (she’s fine).

We live on a rural road, with few houses and even fewer passing cars. Without the cell phone, she could have been there a couple of hours before someone came by.

So, being as this isn’t the Pit, let’s just say I have little use for anti-cell-phone snobs.

9

Okay, since you’re insistent on “real emergencies,” how’s this?

Just yesterday, my dad was driving home on the Sanibel Causeway when he saw a group of people hovering around a guy on his back. One of them was giving him mouth-to-mouth. Dad asked if anyone had called 911. No one had, so he did. The ambulance was pulling onto the bridge as he pulled off. There are no other phones on the causeway that I know of; cell phones are the only way to get in touch with 911 in that situation. Is that an emergency enough for you?

10

And?

That still sounds more like an inconvenience – one that no one wouldwant their wife to suffer, and I’m sure you’re glad you had it, but still a matter of convenience. She “cracked her shoulder”? Meaning what? She banged it? Was she bleeding severly? Was it broken?

I don’t know. Did the person live because the ambulance got there quicker than it would have in a non-cel phone world or did the person just get to the hospital quicker?

11

Why are you limiting your definition of emergency to life-or-death? Doesn’t matter if the guy would have died or not, having a situation that requires mouth to mouth is by definition an emergency, and in the case cited, a cell phone got an ambulance to the scene.

I don’t know that you’re going to find an anecdotal case where someone would have died if not for the cell phone, but that’s not what you appeared to be asking for in your OP.

I may have not used mine to save a life, but it sure did speed up response time in my own personal emergency.

12

I was on a bus when the bus driver was speeding. When he went over a speed bump a girl on the top deck badly injured her back. My phone was used to call an ambulance.

13

what I said was, “I’d like to hear anyone (or someone you know) who had a real emergency where a cel phone made a difference.”

I.e. where the outcome of the situation would have been different in the world before the cel.

I’m not discounting the importance of the cel in any these situations. We have one that we use when we travel. About a year ago, my wife had a blowout in a rain storm in the middle of nowhere and called AAA and then called me just to talk. I was very glad we had one.

Still, I’m sort of thinking about getting rid of it. It used to be essential because she had to call in credit card confirmations with it. Now, she had a machine that does it directly. But, we pay like $35-$40 a month for it, and whole months go by where we don’t even use it.

14

On holiday in Naples, Florida: my Dad falls off jet ski in middle of gulf of mexico and sustains compound fracture to leg.
Bleeding profusely. No one else around.

I’d say the mobile phone (as we say in England) saved his life.

15

For a long time, neither my wife nor myself had cell phones.

One Sunday, I was going to go out to visit my father (who lives in New Jersey). While my sister and her family couldn’t come along, she did send one daughter with us. She also insisted that we take her cell phone. At first we didn’t want to, but eventually we consented.

Sure enough, while traveling on the highway, we begin to smell smoke. So we pull over to the shoulder and I pop open the hood. Immediately, I went to the side of the car and said to my wife “Lisa, get the kids out of the car NOW, it’s on fire!”

Fortunately, the fire department showed up and put out the fire before the car blew up. (I don’t know that it was really in any danger of doing so, but I wasn’t going to hang around it with a fire under the hood to find out.)

Quick calls to 911, my father and AAA ensued. We both got cell phones shortly after that.

Zev Steinhardt

16

zev (love the name, by the way): That’s pretty much why I got a cell phone, too. Enough of the ‘catastrophic’ car failures on a “new” car which was given “six months to live”, a commute along a very dangerous stretch of highway every day … and I’d broken down without one enough times that I was sick of not having one.

Since then I’ve used it about 1 a month to report crazy drivers (and get them pulled over by FHP), debris, accidents, etc. And I’ve only had one ‘bad’ breakdown since then (this was late 1999) and the phone got a tow truck on the way, as well as diverted my husband to pick up the kid from day care ($1 a minute late pickup fines) and deliver the kid to a relative for the night before drivng 60 miles to pick me up from the mechanic’s shop where we dropped the car off.

17

I broke down and obtained one of those pay-as-you-go cell phones this past winter.
I have had to use it in (what I considered) emergent situations twice. First time, my car broke down. Yes, LilMiss and I could have walked a 1/2 mile in a thunderstorm to get to a convience store to use the phone. Rather, I whipped out my cell and called for a tow, called LilMiss’s school to inform them of her impending tardiness, and called my boss to also let her know of impending tardiness. If I hadn’t called my boss, I could’ve faced suspension.

Second time it was used in an emergent situation, I managed to lock myself out of our cabin. Town is 2 miles away. No neighbors. Night time. I called family friends asking for them to deliver a spare key. Yes, I could’ve just sat there and been 'squito chow, or walked to town. However, unless someone in town was gracious enough to let me use their phone, I still would’ve been SOL, as my purse was also locked in the cabin (phone was left in my unlocked car).

My phone is rarely used for any other purpose. Yes, when I was on vacation last week, it was used to check on things here at home, as I was not going to spend $$ using the hotel phones.

18

My nephew was driving along a dark country road. He lost control of his car, went down an embankment and hit a tree head-on. The noise of the crash brought people, but they came from a country-type distance (maybe 1/2 mile or more). They call emergancy services with their cell phones. Now maybe they could’ve gone back home and called from their homes, but considering my nephew was quite badly injured and life-flighted to the Vanderbilt Trauma Center, I’d say that qualifies. In a trauma situation they say it’s imperative to get the victim to a trauma center within an hour, because that’s usually the life-or-death time window.

StG

19

I needed a ride home. OK, so it wasn’t life or death. But it was cold out, and I didn’t want to be stranded for hours.

20

Well, a few years ago I was with my parents, my sister, and her very small child when the car spun out on ice and went into the ditch. No one was in any danger of dying, obviously, but we used a cell (3 of them in the car at the time) to call for a tow.

I’d say the outcome was changed drastically due to the use of a cell phone. Had we not had one… well, what? Someone was supposed to get out and walk to the nearest phone? This was after sunset (probably 6pm or so) on a rural road in the middle of a harsh Minnesota blizzard. There were no houses in sight so god only knows where the closest one was.

IMO, the possibility of freezing to death = emergency. Also IMO, involvement in a bicycle accident that could very well cause you to sit in excruciating pain for any extended period of time (such as, no traffic = no passersby to help you) = emergency. We have cellular phones these days. So they didn’t have them before and people stranded in the middle of winter had to “make do” or figure something else out. Good on them.

We also didn’t have cars before, and the people who needed to get to the market had to “make do” or figure something else out. But I don’t see a whole lot of anti-car people running around. If you don’t like cellphones, fine. Hell, if you don’t like cars, fine. But really, what’s the big deal if I want to call my mom after a non-life threatening accident? Or if I want to call my husband to pick me up because I’ve sustained an injury that makes it pretty much impossible to ride my bicycle home?

Be pissed off because some jerk in the movie theater didn’t turn his phone off, fine. But to demand cellphone users justify their decision to own and use a cellphone? Please.

And by the way, “getting lost” can very well = emergency, IMO. What if I have an appointment I need to get to and I made a wrong turn? What about a job interview? How about if I’m just out and about, cruising around one day (and I do this all the time, with my year old son) and I get myself so lost I can’t get back to anything familiar, and I’m almost out of gas?

(This is getting long, but you know something? I don’t care.) Let’s talk about the “well, there’s a house right there anyway so, really, you could just use their landline” approach. Hi, I’m a 21 year old girl who is most likely travelling with a small child. Alone. Call me paranoid, but I’m not real keen on the idea of knocking on random doors/flagging down random cars in the middle of the night, should my car break down or something.

Also, the time it takes to locate and use a landline can mean the difference between life and death for someone who’s sustained very serious injury. But I guess that’s just a matter of convenience, too. Right?