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Language: en

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There’s an urban legend that dialling 999
--

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the British equivalent of 911 or 112 --

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there's an urban legend that dialling that
number

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will charge your phone battery.

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And if you look online, you’ll see a couple
of police forces in the UK

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put out press releases saying it’s not true,

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don’t do it, it ties up an emergency line.

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And there are articles and comment threads
tearing into the people who believe this.

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How can they be so stupid?

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What idiot would believe this sort of thing?

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Except the weird thing is, it’s almost true.

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Do you remember Blackberries? They were those
phones that businesspeople had

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before actual smartphones came along.

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Their UK headquarters is behind me, here in
Slough.

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[Despairing] Slough.

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Back when Blackberry did have a market share
above 1%,

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it wasn't just business people who used their
phones: teenagers did too.

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BBM – BlackBerry Messenger – was the WhatsApp
of its day.

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Instant, free, unlimited text messaging,

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as long as everyone you knew had a Blackberry
phone –-

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and as long as that phone had battery power.

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See, when certain types of BlackBerries were
really low on battery,

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they’d go into a locked-down “emergency
calls only” mode.

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No BBM. No anything.

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You weren’t getting any use out of it.

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It just said “battery too low for radio
use”.

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It'd let you call the emergency services,

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just in case, but nothing else.

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That was a fairly sensible idea by the BlackBerry
engineers.

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But they went about it in a really half-assed
way,

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and they didn’t think what people would
actually want to do with their phones.

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Because there are emergencies that don’t
involve calling 999.

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Being lost or alone or desperate,

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and just needing to reach one person.

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[sad music] Mum. I'm sorry.

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I've made a big mistake.

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I went to Slough.

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It turned out that on a Blackberry,

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if you made an emergency call and then hung
up immediately...

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the radios in the phone stayed on. The phone
stayed unlocked.

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With all its connections intact. It’d last
a good few minutes,

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as it drained the last bits of its power.

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Except if you locked it, or the screen turned
off.

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Then, depending on the model,

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you might have to dial 999 again to unlock
it.

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You can see where the myth came from.

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And mobile phone providers in the UK,

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they get charged somewhere around a pound
every time

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someone calls 999 through them, even for an
instant,

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so they weren’t too happy about this either.

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Now, I'm not saying there isn’t a space
for careless code in the world,

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for quickly developed ideas.

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Heaven knows I've made enough of them.

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But start cutting corners in a phone that's
used by millions of --

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was used by millions of people,

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and suddenly you’ve got enough hoax calls
coming in

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that it starts to block actual emergencies.

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Tiny decisions that end up making a big difference.

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I'm going to get out of Slough now.

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