The Perfect Phone To Have With You In A Hostage Situation
I love hostage movies, like on a plane or in a bank. I don’t know why, the suspense I guess. The whole what would I do in that situation keeps me tethered to the tube.
It tends to unfold something like this: the robbers rush in, order everyone to get on the ground, and command the staff to get the money.
Something goes wrong, maybe they take too long or the cops show up early, whatever the reason, they can’t leave the bank and a bank robbery becomes a hostage situation.
You can imagine what happens next. They order all the staff to join the customers in the main area and order everyone to give up their cell phone.
Hours pass, but one person with a second phone secretly relays tactical information to the police until the robbers spot the phone and the jig is up. This time they make everyone empty their pockets on the floor and two or three additional phones get collected.
But if this happens to you, you can have an ace up your sleeve. I’m talking about a phone the size of a credit card that doesn’t even look like a modern day phone.
You see, it doesn’t have a screen and looks like a blank credit card most of the time, albeit an unusually thick one. It has a touch sensitive surface that lights up an LED-backlit number pad when you touch it. In can even pass for a pocket calculator at that point. Or those pin devices some banks give you for secure login. Point is it does not look like a phone.
It sends and receives calls, nothing more. No camera, no wifi, nothing. While it was created to help people break smart phone addiction, as your phone away from phone, it really is perfect for a situation like this. You could empty your pockets right in front of the hostage taker, and he wouldn’t notice anything alarming. Since it’s thin enough to fit inside your wallet, you could even leave it in your wallet, as you empty your pockets, avoiding questions all together.
It’s called the Light Phone and should be your next shtf minimalist phone. The light phone takes a nano sim card and ten speed dial contacts. Use this feature to add the numbers of the ten people or services you would call if you were taken hostage.
The company does offer an added value service for which they ask a monthly fee, but you can use the phone without. The service enables seamless call forwarding from your main phone, if you want to use the same number on both.
Use this phone as a concealed-in-plane-sight second phone to relay tactical information to authorities in a hostage situation. Don’t get too blatant though; talking to a calculator is a pretty suspicious thing to do so you’ll still be screwed if they see you doing it.
I don’t usually recommend products that are still in pre-sale but as mass production began in November ’16 and a good number of Light Phones have already been stored in a Chicago fulfillment center, I’m making an exception.