Phones 4 UR Safety
By Jamie Lawson
Call me old fashioned, but I remember a time when lecturers used to ask students to turn off their mobile phones before class began. In fact, in the far off days when I was an undergraduate, I could count the number of my friends who had mobiles on one hand, and those that did seemed only to be plagued by interfering parents.Ah yes, the good old days when the beer was cheap, the grants healthy and mobile telephones a sign of being extremely uncool. Those days are over, and now it seems students are being positively encouraged to bring telephones in to lectures. Did I say encouraged? I meant compelled.
At least, that's how things are looking at Montclair college in New Jersey. So concerned are the Powers That Be with student safety that all students are being issued with GPS enabled mobile telephonic devices and, of course, when I say “issued with”, I mean “forced to buy”.
Yes, for a mere $210 (a little over £100) a semester, students can feel safe and secure in the knowledge that a burly man who may or may not be armed can come and find them wherever they are and get them out of whatever trouble they may be in.
It works like this:
You're walking to your dorm room from the local student eatery/coffee house/ drug free party (this is the USA, kids). It is dark and late and the combination of substandard lighting and artfully placed shrubbery means that there are plenty of places for Someone Who Wishes You Harm to hide. "Gosh", you think, "if only there were a way I could let people know where I am in case I get in to a scrape".
But wait! There is a way! Reaching for your school-issued, GPS enabled, mobile telephone, you press some buttons and a light starts to flash on computer screen in an office somewhere on campus. If you do not turn off the signal within 20 minutes, the computer in the office will dispatch big burly men (equipped with your coordinates, your name, your photograph, your starsign, and your dental records) to your exact location to see why you aren’t home yet. Continued...
More mobile madness:
- Fatty fatty - Flab fighting mobile
- Sniffy sniffy - Eau de phone by Motorola
- Tricky tricky - How to catch a big cat with your phone
- Plain silly - Binary telephones
Image: Jyn Meyer
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