Saturday, July 30, 2011

Emergency calls on Blackberry at 3 a.m.

Grandma and Auntie now insist that my phone should ring even at 3am in the unlikely event that Grandma (who is healthy as a horse and plays Majong all night) is having an attack

Of course, it would make MORE sense to get her one of those "I have fallen and cant get up" necklaces
and then the emergency medical team would show up with a stretcher in 20 minutes... but NO it makes MORE sense to wake me up at 3am and have me call 911...

Knowing Grandma, she would not wear the emergency alert or she would not put battery in it... AND THERE is no guarantee that she will have her cell phone handy and charged..... AND if she suddenly feels she is passing out then she might have 3 seconds of consciousness to press the emergency alert button (which she will never wear) BUT she certainly will not have enough time to whip out the cell phone and find my number.....

ANYWAY on Blackberry..... GO TO the Address book contact of the person who can wake you up at 3am ...

Click on Ring Tones
Click on Phone
You should see the default of CURRENT PROFILE .... which is not intuitively obvious (of course) but means
that IF the phone is set to a current profile of SILENT then the call or email will not ring..... BUT, if you CHANGE the setting to RING ALWAYS
then it will ring through the current profile is set to SILENT even at 3am 

You may do the same for texts and emails I think... which should help if your control-freak boss needs to own your soul

IT IS also possible to create a GROUP called FAMILY or 
COWORKERSfromHELL or 
FriendsWithBenefits or whatever you please and then set the phone to RING ALWAYS so that when the phone is set to silent then everyone added to that group will ring through..... 

HERE IS A VERY CONFUSING part...... 
IN the address book contact entry there is a Category
and one might easily confuse category with CONTACT group... but not so.... 
CATEGORY lets you see all doctors at once, or dentists, or girl friends,..... etc.... 

TO ADD SOMEONE TO A GROUP you need to go to the sound settings and scroll down to CONTACT ALERTS which is where you ADD a contact alert group like FAMILY or WORK... AND once you create that you go there and ADD contacts as members of that group... set the PHONE to some tone (like Calypso or FurElise or MapleLeafRag) and say RING ALWAYS rather than CURRENT PROFILE and if necessary do it with email/text/etc and that way at night you set current profile to SILENT which is symbolized by BLUE ZZZ to denote snoring. But since you made the contact group RING ALWAYS then I THINK the group membership overrides the contact setting..... 

This is all so unnecessarily complex but that is how Companies and programmers and engineers choose to do things.... and they dont even create a WIZARD to walk a mere mortal through the procedure.


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