(no subject)

[brin_bellway]

[cw: venting, (mild) kidnapping]


who the fuck thought it was a good idea to send out an all-hands amber alert at 1:45 in the goddamn morning

all that'll do is tempt me to put my phone in airplane mode at night, causing me to miss any *true* middle-of-the-night emergency alerts that get sent out in the future

(also why are we sending *me* amber alerts, as if I'm gonna be able to recognise the kid)

---

(apparently they found her, btw)

Comments

[brin_bellway]

Also I learned that my phone, like many phones originally designed for the American market, is capable of *showing* Canadian emergency alerts but insists on describing them as "presidential alerts". I guess it's good to know that it functions.

[lunartulip]

This neatly encapsulates my issue with the whole phone-based emergency alert system. Great in theory; in practice, though, it makes it very hard to filter the alerts down to only categories I care about, so I end up turning them off altogether instead and thus missing the chance to be alerted about emergencies which I would like to be alerted about.

(I tried my best to keep them on, at first, but after the first couple middle-of-the-night wakeups I gave up and turned them all off.)

[brin_bellway]

In Canada, you can't turn off emergency alerts except by turning off your cell reception altogether. Not a huge difference in my case, since I already have "do not disturb" mode set to turn on shortly before bedtime each night. (I do currently have do-not-disturb mode set to make exceptions for starred contacts, but in practice the only contacts I've starred live in my house and I would soon find out in-person if any personal-scale emergencies befell them.)

Do emergency services in your area send more alerts than mine? Around here we get an amber alert every couple of months and have never gotten anything else. I think all of our other amber alerts have been at times of day when I was awake.

I will tentatively continue leaving cell reception on overnight, but if this keeps happening I might well turn it off.

[lunartulip]

Huh, that's even worse than what we've got here. Here, at least on my iPhone, there are separate on/off switches for amber alerts, emergency alerts, and public safety alerts. I've got them all off, suggesting that they've all been bothersome to me at one point or another, but it's been long enough that I no longer remember much of the timing-related details.

[contrarianarchon]

... huh, this is not a phone feature we have, I think? I assume if we had it, I would have gotten an alert that one time there was an uncontained bushfire <10km from my house (though I wasn't in my house at the time; me and my friends were in the city getting distracted from our tabletop game by the desire to monitor the CFS website for updates on the uncontained bushfires)

[contrarianarchon]

(On Googling, it looks like we have a similar system but it sends phone calls to geographically topical landlines, and I haven't been near a functioning landline in years)