I recently spent the afternoon at Six Flags Great America in Gurnee, Illinois. While riding the new Maxx Force roller coaster my iPhone decided to mess with me. Perhaps it just wanted to experience the ride out in the open instead of in my pocket so it decided to punk me. While on the ride, which goes from 0-78 mph in under two seconds, it decided to trigger emergency mode. It sent messages to all of my emergency contacts and dialed 911. After the ride was done and I pulled out the phone, I found it locked down in emergency mode and it didn’t allow me to do anything. By randomly swiping and tapping all over the place I got it to let me send an iMessage to my wife letting her know I was fine, but following that I could not send messages to my other contacts. Meanwhile my mother and sister in law were wondering what the heck was going on. After leaving the park another hour or two later I figured out (by accident) how to get the phone to reboot. Pressing the power button was not working and I don’t recall what actually worked in the end.
After rebooting I found a dozen or so messages from my emergency contacts asking what was going on. I also had a message from the Gurnee Police Dept. saying they were responding to a 911 call that had only muffled sounds on the other end.
I have no idea what triggered this, but it was all one big false alarm. Perhaps that ridiculous acceleration followed by a sudden stop at the end of the ride? Anyway, it made for a rather interesting evening.
(Edit to correct “could not send messages”