Wednesday 25 February 2009

Things you didn't know your Mobile or PIN could do!

Perhaps you've received an email that has information like this or this claiming your mobile and PIN have secret powers.

Like, if you enter your PIN in backwards at an ATM the police will be dispatched to the ATM, so do this if a robber forces you to withdraw money. Or you can unlock your car via mobile phone.

(the links set you straight, you can't unlock your car via mobile and the ATM thing doesn't work. it would make it pretty weird for people with palindromic PINs if the one forwards was your regular PIN but the PIN backwards was a special one which alerted the police, because the police would get very confused. However it is somewhat rooted in fact because someone tried to introduce the concept and it got rejected by banks.)

There are also some other tricky things circulating by SPAM which tell you magical things your mobile can do, like have special codes to lock your mobile or find hidden reserves of battery.

ANYHOW.

ORANGE JUICE SNOBBERY is here to provide you with a service, to tell you some VERY SPECIAL powers your mobile has, especially in emergency situations.

none of this "dial #06# and find your special 15 digit authentication code for your handset stuff, who has the time for that anyway?

1. If you are ever forced by a robber to enter your PIN at an ATM and to withdraw money for them from your bank account, forget entering your PIN backwards or dialling emergency. THROW YOUR PHONE AT THEM. It works for Russell Crowe.
2. Your phone has magical powers to unlock your car door if you:
a) buy one of those natty key rings and attach it to your phone. You won't lose your keys so long as you have your phone as well then!
b) you have the NRMA number stored on your phone.
c) you have a very heavy phone and a good swing and don't mind a shattered window on the driver's side.
3. Your phone has magical powers to move crowds, and often ensure you are the first in line of any queue, so long as your taste in ringtones is as bad as mine. Try rap, or themes from TV cheesy TV shows in the 80s.
4. Your mobile phone has the magical power to begin ringing just when you have closed it up and stuffed it in a pocket in your bag behind some books and under a big woolly jumper and done up the zips. It has the capacity to stop ringing and flash "MISSED CALL" just when you have burrowed under all your stuff, thrown all of your accessories out of your bag and onto the pavement in public on a wet day and just grabbed it.

5 comments:

TimT said...

That works out well both in theory and fact, as my mobile phone is more a nuisance than anything else.

Lad Litter said...

Love the myth-busting! There's www.snopes.com, an authoritative specialty urban myth-busting website that Media Watch often cites.

TimT said...

Maria don't need no stinking Snopes. She's her own Snopes, man.

Maria said...

I like mythbusting too! What was that show, mythbusters? Wasn't there a myth that if you drop a cat from a building it will die but if it dropped from anywhere between the 4th and 8th floors it will survive got something to do with the fact that the cat can by then spread itself out and act like a parachute and at this height it can actually get enough air resistance to glide?

Was that ever tested on Mythbusters? Did the Humane Society ever catch up on them?

Maria said...

Hmm, timT, see your point. The trouble with a mobile is that once you get one:

a) you have this damned thing you have to pay for each month or whenever.
b) It often goes off at the most annoying times.
c) People EXPECT you to be available and get really annoyed when you aren't and often stop making the effort to contact at more convenient and proper hours. You have people calling you while you are squashed like a tuna on the train or when your phone is at the bottom of a big bag full of things and you can't reach it, and you only grab it when it finally rings out, and later on someone says to you snottily "Why didn't you answer my call?" or "I RANG YOU!" when in the blissful days before the mobile they never would have called you, or they would have called home and accepted you weren't home and thought nothing of it when you didn;t answer.

or you wake in the middle of the night to hear this "ping" sound and think it must be some really important SMS like "Get out of there, terrorists are invading the building!" but instead a friend is SMSing saying she's had a brainstorm about how to paint her bedroom wall, and maybe she'll do it in turquoise instead of the magenta she was thinking about last time you had been talking, oh and by the way why don't you check out her facebook she's just uploaded forty new random pics. Or something like that.

Something that wasn't worth you waking up, tumbling out of bed taking the covers with you, tripping over your heater, falling over a stack of books, fumbling for your mobile for. That's what.