Bad idea of the day
 

A couple of nights ago I got an Amber Alert on my phone.

Now, most amber alerts are pretty useless because it's some dude who's mad that he can't take his kid to roller derby, so he grabs them and runs. But this one caught my eye.

It was reported that a truck had been stolen, and a 13 year-old girl had been inside when it happened. Police then found the truck abandoned, but the thief and the girl had not been located. It happened 100+ miles away from me, so I wasn't likely to spot the criminal, but I still thought to myself, "Yeah, this is the type of thing that an Amber Alert is good for."

I thought about it today and wondered what happened, so I google-sleuthed.

Apparently the dude whose truck was stolen wanted to create some law enforcement urgency to get his truck back, so he told them that his 13 year-old cousin was in the vehicle and had been kidnapped. Law enforcement found the truck pretty quickly and then probably reacted more strongly than the thief would have expected. As it turned out, the cousin was never in the truck and was just hanging out at home the whole time.

The truck owner is really lucky that this didn't escalate more than it did. But I bet the truck thief is never going to steal a truck again.

https://www.kktv.com/2024/10/17/poli...o-amber-alert/

I was at… the Korn concert? I think? When it went off.
Watching 15,000 amber alerts go off is weird AF.

With that many people, I bet your group caught him.

ARE...YOU...READY?!?!

Last week we got an emergency alert that was unhelpful, to say the least. I was sitting in seminar and my phone was the only one to go off. It just said to evacuate. Like wtf? Where is the threat? Where should we evacuate to? We went back to listening to the seminar speaker, and after 5 min another alert goes off to several phones in the room. It names one of the main thoroughfares in town and a cross street no one had heard of. We googled to see if there was a news story, and sure enough there was one that was posted 30 min before the evacuation notice went off. So the media knew for 30 min before the evacuation notices were issued. It turned out we were not really close to the evacuation zone. It was a case of old dynamite that they found and were not sure if it was stable or not. A good reason to evacuate, but the messages were too late, not specific enough, and did not give actionable instructions. Kind of a failure from my perspective.

Obviously that's a terrible thing to do, but man it's also kind of hilarious. Can you imagine the car thief seeing an Amber Alert come over his phone for the car he just stole?

LMAO I hadn’t considered that.

That’s gotta be a crazy rush.

Another reason I don't go to rap concerts

That’s wild. Got that same Amber Alert. ROFL

I've soiled myself over Amber Alerts. A few years ago here in Utah, we had like three of them go off in a week. One was a mistake, and it went off at something like 5:30 AM. One of the other ones was completely ridiculous - some small town with a domestic situation that was clearly not an emergency. I like the concept of them. It just seems like they're misused.

The situation you're talking about reminds me of an experience I had back in the 90's, before 9/11. I was on a flight for work, waiting at the gate for them to close the doors and go. All of a sudden, we're all getting evacuated - don't even bother gathering your carry-ons, just deplane immediately. Several hours later, we find out that someone on the flight was going to just miss her flight, so she called in a bomb threat.

Bad idea.

Bad Idea Jeans

Heh. I didn't think about that. I wonder if he went out and looked in the truck.

Agreed. That was a really bad idea. But did she make the flight?

These alerts are so useless. We had a “blue” alert a few weeks ago for some cop that got shot. It was in the Texas panhandle. A nine hour drive away. And it came through at 5 AM.

I bet she made it at some point - 3 years later, with good behavior.