Sunday, March 23, 2008

Strange satirical dream

I had a dream where a friend was having trouble breathing and needed medical attention so I tried to call 911. I've been told that when you call 911 from a cell phone, the cell phone goes into a sort of lockdown mode, though I'm not sure if this is true. In any event, after misdialing several times, my phone went into a strange mode and launched a tiny web browser rather than connecting my call. The 911 "website" was a disaster -- all I wanted was an ambulance, but the website had all of the most frustrating aspects of websites:
  1. It required registration ("New user? Click here!")
  2. It had CAPTCHAs which were very difficult to type on the telephone keypad. Apparently, the site was the target of fake 911 calls by spammers.
  3. The web page was extremely long and hard to navigate on the phone.
  4. I think it had advertisements.
Obviously, this is not the future of emergency telephone services, but I find it sort of amusing in some ways. I woke up before things could get worse.