There’s an urban legend that dialling 999 --
the British equivalent of 911 or 112 --
there's an urban legend that dialling that number
will charge your phone battery.
And if you look online, you’ll see a couple of police forces in the UK
put out press releases saying it’s not true,
don’t do it, it ties up an emergency line.
And there are articles and comment threads tearing into the people who believe this.
How can they be so stupid?
What idiot would believe this sort of thing?
Except the weird thing is, it’s almost true.
Do you remember Blackberries? They were those phones that businesspeople had
before actual smartphones came along.
Their UK headquarters is behind me, here in Slough.
[Despairing] Slough.
Back when Blackberry did have a market share above 1%,
it wasn't just business people who used their phones: teenagers did too.
BBM – BlackBerry Messenger – was the WhatsApp of its day.
Instant, free, unlimited text messaging,
as long as everyone you knew had a Blackberry phone –-
and as long as that phone had battery power.
See, when certain types of BlackBerries were really low on battery,
they’d go into a locked-down “emergency calls only” mode.
No BBM. No anything.
You weren’t getting any use out of it.
It just said “battery too low for radio use”.
It'd let you call the emergency services,
just in case, but nothing else.
That was a fairly sensible idea by the BlackBerry engineers.
But they went about it in a really half-assed way,
and they didn’t think what people would actually want to do with their phones.
Because there are emergencies that don’t involve calling 999.
Being lost or alone or desperate,
and just needing to reach one person.
[sad music] Mum. I'm sorry.
I've made a big mistake.
I went to Slough.
It turned out that on a Blackberry,
if you made an emergency call and then hung up immediately...
the radios in the phone stayed on. The phone stayed unlocked.
With all its connections intact. It’d last a good few minutes,
as it drained the last bits of its power.
Except if you locked it, or the screen turned off.
Then, depending on the model,
you might have to dial 999 again to unlock it.
You can see where the myth came from.
And mobile phone providers in the UK,
they get charged somewhere around a pound every time
someone calls 999 through them, even for an instant,
so they weren’t too happy about this either.
Now, I'm not saying there isn’t a space for careless code in the world,
for quickly developed ideas.
Heaven knows I've made enough of them.
But start cutting corners in a phone that's used by millions of --
was used by millions of people,
and suddenly you’ve got enough hoax calls coming in
that it starts to block actual emergencies.
Tiny decisions that end up making a big difference.
I'm going to get out of Slough now.
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