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Trapped Girls Call For Help On Facebook
definate writes "Two teenage girls (aged 10 and 12) found themselves trapped/lost in a stormwater drain in Adelaide, South Australia. The interesting point of this article that makes it Slashdot worthy, is that although the teenage girls had mobile phones, instead of calling for help using 000 (Australia's 911 number), they decided to notify people through Facebook. My guess is it was something along the lines of 'Jane Doe is like totally trapped in a stormwater drain, really need help, OMG!'. Luckily a young friend of the girls was online at the time and was able to call the proper authorities."
get me to australia!
"Two teenage girls (aged 10 and 12)..."
Teenagers just keep getting younger and younger these days.
So it's not unthinkable to imagine that they had crap for voice reception but had no issues with a web connection, especially given that they were inside a storm drain.
Oh, and when did a ten-year-old and twelve-year-old become teenagers? (The answer: "not yet".)
I will admit, silly as it may sound, contacting rescuers via messaging in a non-critical emergency situation may not be a bad idea. It's more friendly battery-wise, where you may not get a chance to recharge a cell phone (in the sewers, for instance); and it can be less ambiguous than speech and more easily reviewed (although all the OMGs and missing vowels might prove problematic.
The lack of common sense is astounding.
Probably not as stupid as people assume. No where in the article was it mentioned that it was an emergency situation. They were lost in a place that they shouldn't have been, and probably just wanted some advice without drawing a lot of attention to themselves. Obviously using Facebook wasn't the wise move if they wanted to be discrete.
Sigh. The stupid stuff people keep asking over and over.
To me, teenager always meant 10 and up. I don't know. Maybe the definition is different in Australia. (I'm from Adelaide, too, btw, where this took place. Adelaide is a city of just over 1 million people.)
What were they doing in a storm drain? I don't know, exploring maybe? We've had stories about underground urban exploration on slashdot before, and there's many sites out there on it, such as caveclan. (http://www.caveclan.org/). Their site appears to be down atm but it was about the exploration of tunnels in Melbourne and around Australia.
And yeah, as others pointed out; perhaps their signal wasn't strong enough to call but they could text or get data.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
In the dark or in smoke it was a lot easier to keep your finger in a single digit on a rotary dial (once you'd found the right one obviously). The same probably applies to a lesser extent for touch tone phones. Its the american 911 system that I find odd , it just seems to be a number chosen at random or perhaps as a left over dial code.
That's nothing. Once I was stuck on a planet so primitive that the inhabitants thought digital watches and mobile phones are a good idea. And I'm still stuck.
We are the Borg...
Well you have to die or compromise your ability to procreate to "win". It's not an award for stupid people, else we'd give you one too.
Try to realise that everyone in the world does not speak English, play baseball, use Fahrenheit....
Ah, but they should!
Putting the "anal" back into "analyst"...
Yeah... but 10 is Australia's 13.
Data can take all day to send a 1k message to Facebook, Twitter, ect...
But if you're stuck in a stormdrain at the time, hopefully it won't!
What's with all the Darwin Award comments? I'm not normally one to complain about black humour, but Really? Walking into a stormwater drain is hardly mortal peril, and if it were, don't you think 12 year-olds are young enough to legitimately not know better?
Plus there are situations where being able to text "help, I'm being held hostage" is a more viable option than making a voice call to say "help, I'm being held hostage"
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?