I had quite an experience this past weekend that really made me sit up and start taking more notice of crime and safety.

My Fiancé was at the hairdresser on Saturday morning while I was playing a few rounds of golf on my Wii when I received an SMS from her that said the following: “I am in an emergency. Please help me.”. I started to panic thinking the worst - hijacking, kidnapping, etc. and immediately grabbed my car keys and sped out. Just before that I tried to call the cops - who were more than useless. The guy didn’t understand that my Fiancé was in an emergency and that could he get someone to go to the hairdresser in Gordon’s Bay immediately. I hung up the phone after the guy kept on repeating “Ehh, what must I do? What emergency?”.

I then jumped in my car and called her phone - which immediately answered. I could hear her in the car, with the radio on, but couldn’t hear anything else. I assumed she had sent the SMS somehow and was answering the phone in her pocket. This made me panic even more as I had no idea where she was heading - kidnapped and all. I was in a total panic as I was driving to get to the last place she was in Gordon’s Bay. Her sisters also got the SMS and were calling me, but I had no more information than they did.

3 minutes later I spotted her car at the robot, and there she was, looking all beautiful after being at the hairdresser. I stopped in the middle of the traffic and asked her where her phone was - and she opened her bag and showed it to me. It was a false alarm. I was totally relieved to see her safe and totally oblivious to what I had just gone through in the last 5 minutes.

Samsung’s SOS function

You see, she had activated a function on her phone that sends out an SMS to 4 people she specifies and the phone then goes into SOS mode and auto answers calls from only those people that got the SMS.

To activate it, you press the volume key 4 times while the phone is locked.

Yes, the possibility of you actually being able to activate it in an emergency might be slim, but at least you have that possibility. Vodacom have a similar function called Look4Help that you can check out if you don’t own a Samsung.

Consider setting it up, it could just save your life.