7445/19965
Was very much looking forward to the 3pm national emergency alarm test. I was hoping they’d cut back to the crowd during half time at the football to show us what it sounded like when tens of thousands of phones went off at the same time. But I had a bigger surprise in store. Firstly my wife’s alarm went off at 2.59pm, a full minute early. I’d forgotten it was happening anyway, so it was still a surprise and not a pleasant one. The noise was pretty gruesome even with just one phone. Given it will usually mean a terrorist attack or nuclear war it’d be nice if the alarm was something a bit less alarming. Maybe Stephen Fry saying, “Don’t worry too much chums but I’ve got a tinsy bit of bad news for you…..”
But worse was to come. My phone did not issue the warning or make a sound. It remained silent. If there was an emergency someone had decided that I wasn’t going to find out about it. Was this an Ark A/Ark B scenario? My wife had been deemed worthy of saving, but I was just cannon fodder for whoever or whatever had decided to wish us harm. This was confirmed when Victoria Coren tweeted that she got the alarm but David Mitchell didn’t. Someone was making a decision based on worthiness. Society after the apocalypse would need clever, attractive women, but funny, useless men were surplus to requirements. Some got the warning 25 minutes late, which is a neat joke for something that probably was going to occur immediately or within four minutes, but my phone didn’t beep all day. Not even with a spamming text message. Whilst those with the alarm would be safe in the citadel, David Mitchell and me and the other mutants (mostly on the 3 network apparently) would be scrabbling in the post-nuclear wasteland for food and weapons and building a thunderdrome. Shit.
Hopefully we never hear that sound again or in the case of people who didn’t get it and weren’t sitting near someone who did, never at all. Though why are they testing it if they don’t think we’ll need it. Good to know though that even in arranging for all our deaths the government proves its incompetence. I think for most scenarios I might rather not know what was coming..
We’ve finished Colin from Accounts and moved on to Barry, which I’d never seen before and which does seem to have slipped under a lot of people’s radars, but it’s very good and even better - there’s a few series to binge.
