By Whitney
My husband has had the same cell phone number for 10 years. You can imagine how surprised I was when I began to dial his cell phone number from my home phone one day and couldn’t remember the order of the digits. Why did I suffer this memory loss? Two minutes earlier, my 4-year-old son had run full speed ahead into a doorway and was now cradled in my arms, bleeding profusely from the forehead. And my cell phone was acting wonky. And my two-year-old was clinging to my leg. And my home phone is not programmed with speed dial numbers because, well, I have a cell phone that does that.
So there I was, carrying my bleeding kid around the house, searching for a scrap of paper on which I may have written my husband’s cell phone number for a babysitter, cursing myself for having not kept it on the fridge like I did when my son was first born and my habits were more safety conscious.
Safety tip #1: Do not rely on memory or technology for phone numbers. Use the old-fashioned method of posting critical information on the fridge.
Later that week, as I repeated this now funny anecdote to some other moms as we sat waiting for our children’s swimming lessons to end, our conversation turned to 9-1-1. I had not forgotten the conveniently short number 9-1-1 during the head-bleeding incident. But, I knew that the wound I was dealing with, which required one stitch across the eyebrow, did not merit a 9-1-1 call. (I had lost my memory, but not my mind.)
When I have called 9-1-1 in the past, I told the other moms, I have waited a long time for my call to be answered. Also, a 9-1-1 call placed from a cell phone may not be identifiable to the call center in terms of location. The call is picked up by the nearest cell tower and then dispatched to the appropriate local law enforcement agency. If you are in a true emergency and call 9-1-1 from your cell, be sure to provide your location clearly.)
Safety tip #2: Look up your local police dispatch phone number and program it into your phone. Use “9-1-1”as the contact name to force your electronic address book to list it first.
