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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."
The girls were eligible for a Darwin Award and you took it away from them!
get me to australia!
"Two teenage girls (aged 10 and 12)..."
Teenagers just keep getting younger and younger these days.
Everyone knows that if you need to call for rescue, you use twitter.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
They might have gotten 112,076 "fans of teenage girls trapped in wells."
Actually, my wife was stuck in an elevator once and while her cellphone couldn't maintain a signal well enough to call out, she could text and email.
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".)
Darwin at work, foiled by luck.
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.
So, what did they post exactly? I really doubt they actually called for help and I doubt even more they wouldn't have called 000 by themselves eventually. It's not like they were dying or something, they were just lost.
0x or or snor perron?!
As kids, my friends and I used to play in the storm water drains by our houses all the time. They were about 10' tall, 15' wide, and 150' long. (They were basically under-passes for where the streams ran under the roads.) One could hardly get trapped unless there was an immediate flash flood.
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.
"Two teenage girls (aged 10 and 12)..."
Teenagers just keep getting younger and younger these days.
They're naught-teen and twain-teen, respectively. Where is the mystery here, gentlemen?
Bow-ties are cool.
Much like the famous "ballsack conundrum" thread on fark... I'm stuck to my chair. I'm so very scared. Help. (Details In thread) "Need help soonish..."
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Everyone knows that if you need to call for rescue, you use twitter.
"HELP ME! I am stuck and in real trouble and hurt real bad! I think my leg is broken, and I am losing a lot of blood. You can find me at"
Bow-ties are cool.
What were they doing in a storm water drain....?
Searching for the Ninja Turtles, probably.
Bow-ties are cool.
Moss: Subject: Fire. Dear Sir/Madam, I am writing to inform you of a fire that has broken out on the premises of 123 Cavendon Road... no, that's too formal.
[deletes text, starts again] Fire - exclamation mark - fire - exclamation mark - help me - exclamation mark. 123 Cavendon Road. Looking forward to hearing from you. Yours truly, Maurice Moss.
[sigh of relief]
No, you just have to say you are.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Being kids.
Caves are cool. My friends and I used to go sledding in them in the winter. There was a runoff drain that ran under an entire golf course, probably about 300 yards long or so, and in the winter the bottom of it would ice up, so you could run your sled through it, in complete darkness and at great speed, with random 2 foot dropoffs as the pipes joined. Watch your head.
Every now and again, someone'd get hurt and end up in the hospital.
Kids do stupid stuff. It's part of being a kid.
I always played it safe - I wore my bike helmet. We also had someone go through first thing every day with a flashlight to make sure there were no obstacles, and he'd climb back up and give a report. Though generally by the time het got back half the kids were tired of waiting and went anyway. (grin)
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
I should have clarified that to say "caves are cool, and a storm drain is a big cave that's unlikely to collapse".
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
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.
They didn't have a cell signal and were leaching someone's wireles. Sounds good, right?
ten and twelve do not end in "teen"
To the contrary, the tens through twelves do end in the teens.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Just yesterday I was stranded after a wedding (it was a good wedding), without a car or cell phone. Let's just say it was a hell of a time. Anyway, long story short, I wake up one morning in a hotel room without any contact information and I have to let my family know where I am - except they all just got a new iPhone, have changed their number, and I have yet to remember it.
Guess where one of those phone numbers was? Facebook. I found myself a public terminal in the hotel lobby and got all the information I needed to be reuinted with my car, phone, and the road.
It is actually quite useful.
My stepmother was alone in the house and fell, breaking her tailbone. She managed to painfully drag herself across the room to the phone, which she used not to call 911, but to call a friend of hers from church. When she got that person's machine, she left a message asking her friend to pray for her. She then lay on the floor moaning until my brother happened to stop by the house and discover her several hours later. I never found out whether or not her friend got the message and prayed for her.
--Posted anonymously because the stupid burns.
WTF? 000 is Australia's EMERGENCY number. Would you also say "they drive on the left side of the road (Australia's right)"? In China thay use chopsticks (Chinese knives and forks)?".
There is a point at which explaining by Yankie analogies just makes it more confusing. Try to realise that everyone in the world does not speak English, play baseball, use Fahrenheit.... I'm sure most of the readers here actually can cope with that, and you won't bamboozle the ones who AREN'T American either.
...apparently everyone on the Internet can hear you when you scream.
Oh, and everyone will eventually find those naked pics too.
one of the nice things about 911 is the 9 and the 1s are on different sides of the keypad, so if you call 911, you really mean to call it
Where there's a will, there's a way! :-)
In my office, we've had the police come by several times to the point where building management had to send an e-mail blast saying that we were going to get fined for accidentally dialing 9-1-1 and then hanging up. To dial out of our phone system, we have to hit 9. A lot of us have to get on conference calls which requires a 1-888 or 1-866 number. Well, some of my office mates would hit 9 to connect out, but for whatever reason they don't hear the dial tone, so they hit 9 again. (even though it registered the first time...)
Then for whatever reason, they would hit 1 twice (probably for the same reason why they hit 9 twice), connecting them to emergency dispatcher. They would immediately hang up, but by then it's too late. The dispatcher will automatically assume an emergency if you hang up, and a patrol car is sent to our office. We were told that if we accidentally do this again, to just stay on the line and to tell the dispatcher that it was an accident so that they don't automatically send police over.
I don't think we've had the problem since the warning, but I think it's interesting that despite the keys being all the way across the keypad, people still manage to dial 9-1-1.
Best "String" Ever!
Going back to rotary phones which went clockwise 0987654321 (except in NZ) 111 would be really fast to dial but it can happen accidentally too easily with a loose wire or something because it's just three pulses. I'm guessing but that sort of accidental dialing is why the British choose 999. It's very unlikely that a loose wire would generate 9 pulses at the right pulse rate even once let along three times. But ... it's slower so maybe the US took a compromise and went for 911. I suspect in practice that the time you gain with less dial movement would be lost moving your finger.
The Kiwi dials went clockwise 0123456789 so I guess we followed the Brits and choose 111 which is the same pulses as 999 elsewhere.
Australian 000 is an odd choice. I vaguely remember some problems long ago with toll blocking on phones also unintentionally blocking 000. That probably only happened with equipment not approved for Australia.
Well, you have to be 13 to have a Facebook account. They have Facebook accounts. So they must be 13, and hence teenagers, even if they're only 10 and 12. Seems perfectly clear to me.
I like to be modded up as much as the next person, but Insightful? Jeez, I was trying for Funny.
SMS uses messages on management connections that have stronger, more redundant error correction than the voice bearers. This is why in marginal signal situations, you can text but not talk.
Evil people are out to get you.
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.
In the states, dialing the operator, dialing "0," in an emergency was drilled into kids for the better part of one hundred years.
"911" was easily recognized by AT&T's switching logic as needing special handling. The History of 911
The "9" may have been suggested by the British "999" system adopted in 1937.
---
Unless it's a prank call (and even then, you normally just get a ticking-off by an irate policeman from what I've read), when would any emergency-service make you PAY for its use ? Isn't the whole point of an emergency service to be there when you need it ? What the hell do you do if you can't afford an emergency service ?
:)
I'm guessing the whole 'paying' idea is a USA thing, although my apologies to the US for assuming that, if there's anywhere else that's so screwed up that they make you pay for essential services.
I've recently had very bad news in my family - in the space of two weeks, my uncle has been told he needs heart surgery, and my mother has been diagnosed with breast cancer. My uncle has been scheduled for surgery on 15th of this month, and my mother has put off her appointment (originally on the 11th) because I'm getting married on the 12th. She'll be going under the knife on 19th instead. My uncle will be missing the wedding, but we're going to stream it live so he can watch it in the UK, even if it is at midnight over there
I thank my lucky stars we're from the UK, because there's just no way our family could afford their treatment over here in the USA - my uncle's heart surgery would cost circa $175,000, my mother's cancer treatment and subsequent costs could come to circa $100,000. We've never had money - I was the first kid in our family to go to college for example, and I had to pay my way through that. We've always scraped-by and made-do, mother and father working, grandmother looking after the kids etc. Over here, I'm lucky in that I have an excellent medical insurance plan from my company, but my fiancee didn't have medical insurance until we met. She used to try not to visit a doctor, to self-medicate via a drugstore if something was wrong. I was horrified that someone would even consider that. Seriously and truthfully - I was aghast that a visit to the doctors wasn't just "what you'd do if you're not feeling well". It's just a no-brainer from my (and anyone from the UK, I suspect) perspective.
For her part, my mother gets personal visits in her home from the MacMillan nurse (cancer specialist nurses, there to answer any questions, give advice, as well as do the nursing stuff), and she has one of the best surgical teams in the country ready to operate when she gets back to the UK. All of this is standard-stuff, she pays her dues (in her taxes / national insurance contributions), and she has the peace-of-mind that comes from knowing she has access to excellent health-care whenever she wants it, without being suddenly landed with huge bills, and without any worry of 'recission' by a financially-orientated insurance company.
There's a lot I like (even prefer) about the USA, but the healthcare system is (from an outsiders perspective) a badge of shame. Everyone gets sick eventually, and everyone dies eventually. Any civilised country ought to recognise and cope with that such that people don't fall through the cracks. The NHS in the UK isn't perfect - you'll frequently hear Brits complaining about it - but it's head, shoulders, and torso above the system over here. I still pay my 'national insurance' in the UK, even though I live in the US - the cost is minimal (about £15/month), and I don't mind helping fund something today that I (or, say, a member of my family) might make use of tomorrow. To me, it's beyond belief that people in the USA fight *against* a similar system, but hey, each to their own. I don't get to vote over here so it's not as though I can do anything about it...
Bottom line: In the UK, health follows an almost burger-king like mantra - "you need it? You got it!" whereas in the USA, you're trusting your health and possibly your life to the same sort of company that screws you
Physicists get Hadrons!
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?
Funnily enough, I was in a motorbike accident myself before I came over to the USA. Nowhere near as bad as your own (I was very lucky) but I was in hospital for a couple of days, rode there in the ambulance, had police and fire trucks called out to the scene etc. There was no charge, and it didn't cross my mind that there would be...
:) and has only got a position as a long-term contractor; she would have had to pay her own medical insurance without any company aid, which (even with her income) is simply ridiculously expensive. If a well-educated well-to-do person can't afford medical insurance, something is rotten in the state of Denmark...
Any (every ?) government gets a lot of flak for pretty much anything it does - you can't please all the people all the time and all that, but at the end of the day, they're not trying to make a profit. Any private institution has to run all the same risks, spend all the same money, and also make a return on the investment. Normally I'm fully behind this as a great motivator for the company concerned, but when the easy option is to simply screw the "customer" in order to turn a profit, I'm not so sure.
In any event, the point of my post wasn't about people like you and I, with good medical insurance coverage. It was because I don't believe *anyone* should be concerned about medical coverage, even if that costs me something. That, I think, is a big cultural divide between the US and the UK on this matter, not just the public/private debate.
My fiancee is in fact more-qualified than I, she has a JD/MBA. However, she is still paying off student debts (another thing I didn't have to worry about in the UK, but that's another rant altogether
As far as the argument that you don't trust the government because of its past performance, it seems you do trust an insurance company, despite all evidence to the contrary of how they behave when you need them to pay up. Anyone who's been involved in a car accident would probably attest that (a) they screw you if they can, and (b) they screw you later by increasing your premiums, even if they somehow didn't manage to screw you via (a).
On top of that, Medical insurance agencies have come up with (c), a new evil: "recission". This is where they go back through your file looking for any possible (no matter how tenuous) excuse to retroactively cancel your insurance (even after payment has been initially made), leaving you with the huge bill that you might even have thought was already paid, and no possibility of getting any medical insurance in the future. I read of a case where a fall by the pregnant mother cancelled a policy by the adult daughter when the daughter developed vision problems at age 27.
I'm sorry, but that just sucks. Really. Really. Really sucks.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
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[meanwhile, the victim dies because "911 Emergency Response" is actually "sleeping in today and not going to class cuz last night was so crazy omfg".]
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