No emergency here!

I just remembered a crazy story I could tell you. It was last weekend, when John and I were supposed to be in Mexico, but instead were relaxing in Tucson. We were having a lazy Sunday morning, and I was Christmas shopping in bed. (Yay, internet!) I had just texted Emily about the gift I had ordered for her girls. Then John got done in the shower, so I got up to take my shower.

At that moment, Biska jumped onto the bed and walked on my phone, which was lying on the bed unlocked, because I had just texted my sister. I’m not quite sure what happened next, in exactly what order, but my phone went into some sort of super zoomed in mode where you couldn’t see anything! It wouldn’t zoom out; it was frozen in a super-close-up error mode.

Moments later, my phone announced it was calling the emergency dispatch line. We tried to stop it but my phone was unresponsive. Seriously, Biska managed to call 911! And you can’t just hang up on them. So next thing I know, John was standing dripping wet naked in the hallway trying to explain to emergency dispatch personnel that I am fine (luckily this was just a call on my phone, they hadn’t actually come to the house yet).

In hindsight, it seems like the emergency dispatcher should have asked to speak with me, to make sure I was indeed fine. Like who is this guy, assuring them that “Kristina” is fine? But they took John’s word for it, and we thought everything was good. Whew.

But unbeknownst to us, my phone also alerted both Laura and Emily. I guess they’re both listed as my emergency contacts. My phone alerted John’s phone too, but in the confusion, we didn’t even notice that his phone was binging away. I mean, how many emergency contacts can one person have? Three, apparently.

Here’s what Laura got – I assume Emily and John got the same thing:

So of course, Emily and Laura immediately checked in, “Are you ok? Is everything ok? What’s going on?” I wouldn’t even have known they were trying to reach me except my phone messages also come in on my computer. And once we did finally get my phone restarted, Emily had taken time out of work to call me. OMG too much excitement for a relaxing Sunday morning!

When everything was over, these two pictures were on my phone.

I assume John hit the side buttons that took screenshots while trying to shut the phone down. He was trying to shut it down because we couldn’t actually hit that handy little X that says “stop” to cancel the emergency call, because the phone was so zoomed in it was completely not legible or operational. Apparently the screenshot is of what we were supposed to have been seeing, not what we were actually seeing. In reality, the phone was zoomed in so far you could hardly see a few pixels, and certainly couldn’t access the necessary X. What the screen actually looked like is this:

That was the entire screen! And we couldn’t pan around or zoom out or do anything. It was stuck that way. So there was no way to cancel the emergency call. Talk about frustrating!

The good news is, now my dog knows how to call 911 – useful skill.

To send Kristina a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com.

Kristina’s Website: Life Coaching for Adults with Autism