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Comment by aashay | Hacker News Reader

What are your plans in case of emergencies?

What kinds of emergencies? I live in a pretty densely populated city, so there are basically always people around. I guess I'd just yell for help in the worst case? But if I'm not literally incapacitated in a gutter, I'd walk to the nearest police station, hospital, metro station, or 24-hour 7/11. Or knock on an apartment door to request help.

What I find strange about this (common) question is that nobody seems to remember what they did before mobile phones. I got my first mobile phone in 2001, but it's not like I was chained to my house from birth until 2001.

I admit I might be more wary if I lived in a suburban or rural area where I could end up broken down in a car miles from civilization. Then a phone is a nice backup.

Even in a sparsely populated area, you could keep your phone in your car, turned off, and just turn it on if you did have an emergency.

...While paying for it the whole time.

Prepaid phone?

Minutes always expire. You are forced to buy a certain amount every few months.

Tmobile prepaid is $100 a year.

The $0.10 minutes that come with that aren't especially competitive with other prepaid services. I'm not sure they will activate a phone everywhere.

But the 'have a working phone' baseline isn't all that inconvenient or all that expensive.

We don't all live in a country that has T Mobile

You're still 'paying for it the whole time' regardless of whether the phone is turned on or off, assuming you're on a plan.

The phone simply being turned on doesn't equate to more calls being made. Like the parent said, turn it on when you need it.

My point is that if you don't have one at all, you pay nothing.

You can call 911 even if you don't pay for cell service. We gave my grandmother an old, deactivated cell phone just for that purpose.

"The FCC's basic 911 rules require wireless service providers to transmit all 911 calls to a PSAP, regardless of whether the caller subscribes to the provider’s service or not." http://www.fcc.gov/guides/wireless-911-services/

Doesn't cover calling a tow truck, AAA, or a friend or relative to come pick you up. But if you only use the phone for real life-threatening emergencies, you don't have to pay.

Emergencies like your parents having a heart attack. When someone needs to reach you quickly, not the other way around.

While I'd appreciate being notified if a parent has a heart attack, there's a whole bunch of more important people that need to be called before me - get them an ambulance before you call me - and, truth is, there's very little I could do in terms of "emergency response" anyway.

I can't off-hand think of anything where contacting me personally would be required in an "emergency situation", if it's really an "emergency" there's probably better qualified people to call. This is colored by my situation, I'm not a parent, I'm not the sole decision maker for anything mission critical (either personally or professionally). I'd be sad (or sadder) if my Mum or Dad died and I missed out on saying goodbye because nobody could contact me immediately, but they live 5hrs away from me so that's a pretty unlikely scenario.

I'm kinda "at peace" with spending time "uncontactable" anyway, I spend at least an hour a day (and sometimes 8 or 10 hours) on a motorcycle - where I might feel my phone ringing in my pocket, but I don't answer it until I've got to where I'm going and stopped the bike. I also treat the phone the same way in movies/restaurants/gigs/meetings, and often while deep in something complicated at work.

Personally, I don't buy into the idea that my phone is so other people can reliably contact me immediately in case of emergency. When work wants that, it's called "on-call" and they pay me for it. In my personal life, I answer my phone if and when it suits me, and I'm not enslaved to anybody who happens to have my number.

This is the healthiest view I've seen in the comments for this article - so far.

I've found out that most times when I "urgently" want to get a hold of someone - leaving a well thought out message works out just as fine.

This is only an issue because it is possible and as a result we are infantilising ourselves. If you cannot be contacted over something that you would find important, this is not a tragedy, even if the circumstances are tragic. Before telephones, people would still travel all over the world and would only find out things like this by letter, sometimes months after the event.

At what point did that question become relevant to every facet of life?

I honestly can't believe it when people ask that question. It's such a scare tactic.

...when you have kids and attempt to live a life away from home?

I've been out of my home country for > 6 years, have lived and worked in 3 countries in that time, and spent 2 years driving through 16 more. Does that qualify?

Right, and it's not like the people who somehow existed before cell phone technology magically perished because of these supposed emergencies. We are not helpless creatures here, sheesh.

FWIW my question wasn't meant to be a scare tactic. I genuinely wanted to know what the plan was in case of emergencies. I suppose I could have (and should have, since HN seems to value explicitness and literalism) elaborated to avoid assumption and/or presumption.

What was the plan of your parents and grandparents in case of emergencies?

Don't buy in to the fear mentality that's strangling American discourse. People were dealing with emergencies just fine without cell phones... just 15 years ago.

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