The iPhone Is A Lifesaver... Literally.
When it finally subsided there was massive amounts of flooding, property damage (one elementary school was completely submerged!!) and of course lots of road closures. I ventured intrepidly towards this moist frontier as I began making my way home to good ole Suburbia. The first road closure I encountered, I handled with confident indifference. I calmly re-routed my vehicle, pleased with myself for the amount of local geography I knew, and charted myself a different path. But my alternate route was flooded out too…as was my third alternate, and so forth. In all, I wandered aimlessly down 7 or 8 different trajectories to make it home, but it seemed as if my house was an island…(literally actually in this case), and all the bridges were currently out of order.
Needless to say, there were lots of really stressed out people amidst all of this, and some that were far worse off than just being stressed. I had it comparatively good during the whole ordeal, in large part (get ready to roll your eyes) thanks to my iPhone.
Here are five ways the iPhone saved my life this last week!!! Ok, that’s a little dramatic. Rather, these are the five things that made life a lot easier during some pretty tough times.
Good Call Reception/Quality/Consistency-
Sure I have a hate relationship with AT&T, but I have to say, it helped me when it counted. I needed to make a lot of calls to get everything in order; let my family know I was safe, direct people I knew away from the bad spots, talk to the news-watching friends of mine to see how this thing was tracking, etc.
I never got disconnected from a single person; well, except my girlfriend-but that disconnection was unrelated to signal strength.
Maps-
While I was talking, it was imperative that I could look at the maps simultaneously. (The fact that I can’t multi-task, was another hurdle entirely.) The highlighted traffic routes were incredibly helpful in helping me to find my way around through all the back roads after the highways shut down.
Emergency radio-
A couple of times I was able to get wind of some accidents down the road I was on and then quickly make a change. However, the fact that the police are using like undercover ninja language and you need a PHD to decipher all the codes they’re using, it wasn’t really all that useful after all.
Camera-
There were some pretty intimidating images to be seen during all of this, and for better or worse I was able to capture some of them. It was like, you see something and five seconds later you can snap it… fantastic.
Games-
Traffic sucks, but having nowhere to go but another dead end for literal hours…sucks even more. To stem the tide of this major suck, I had some fun games to keep me entertained. One of note was Unify, which is as close to being the best casual game ever as you can get without being the best casual game ever.
Strange, I just realized that not once during the whole ordeal did I even open the weather app…interesting.
So sure these were basic attributes of the iPhone. No new ground broken here. But let me tell you something. When events like this happen, (and they seem able to happen just about anywhere) it becomes vitally important that you have reliable tools. Without irony I can say that at this point, my iPhone became as important to me as any flashlight, bottled water, or jumper cables ever were.
Do you remember sitting at your house, contemplating over whether or not you really needed an iPhone? I think most of us probably went through that. You run through in your mind, all the reasons that sound important and meaningful as to why you should purchase this admittedly flashy and probably unnecessary device.
Deep down you know that your not buying it for its ability to help you with homework, to save money in the long run, or to feed baby koalas-but you got it anyway. But this once, my iPhone fulfilled just such a lofty purpose.
So now, I can actually feel comfortable in the knowledge that this little device I bought (seemingly just to play ridiculous fun games like Unify on), just might have been worth it after all.
What about ya’ll, has your iPhone ever helped you out of a sticky situation?
