Steve’s Tech Journal

While in Washington last week, colleague Julie Hedlund told me about the British paramedic who suggests that we all put an ICE entry in our mobile phonebooks, ICE standing for In Case of Emergency. The idea is that in many crisis or emergency situations where a person is unconscious, the first responders have to waste valuable time trying to figure out how to find a person’s emergency contacts.

My immediate reaction was “hmmm, that makes sense”. Then later I wondered if this was one of the internet hoaxes, you know, the “dying boy wants post cards” kind of thing. But I thought, if a hoax, it’s one that has a positive effect, there’s no harm in making the entry in your mobile phone, and if paramedics start looking for it, then it’s a valuable idea anyway.

Urban Legend site snopes to the rescue, even if it does put up an annoying number of pop-ups and pop-unders, in this case for the guys at Vonage who must be burning through that 200 mil. They claim this is not a hoax — it’s for real. Here’s the scoop.

To my thinking, this just makes good sense. My one other thought is that ICE could be a convenient thing if you lose your cellphone. Someone might just think to look for the ICE entry and call it …