Oh my…emergency!

On a recent weekend, I woke up listening to a familiar tune. I reached out to my phone to figure out if that’s my daily alarm (which I regularly ignore) or a call from of one of my 4am friends. Trying best to hold-up my droopy eye-lids fighting the brightly-lit screen, I realised it was a call, not from a friend or a familiar number.

“Strange”, I told myself sliding my finger across the screen to answer the call. “Salam alaikum” - I was greeted by serious sounding Arabic male voice on the other end. Before I could think of the correct Arabic response (which is of course, Wa-alaikum–salam) came some additional information from the other end “This is Dubai Police, Do you have an emergency?”

A call from the police, first thing in the morning – boy didn’t that wake me up! Quickly gaining my composure and switching the lights on I replied “Sorry Officer, I think…it must be a mistake…err…misunderstanding?”

Listening then to the officer who continued “We got an emergency call from your number”, I quickly scanned the room to zeroed-in on a tiny target, a sheepish looking Smera. I knew by then what had happened. A profound apology from my side for the early morning trouble ensued.

But the real trouble is that my fifteen-month-old is an early riser and I am not. Once she is awake, she would try every trick in the book to get me out of the bed. On that day, she obviously got bored and called the police to get her mother out of the bed! You have to give credit where it’s due, she did manage to wake me up early on that day.

You may remember from one of my earlier posts Smera’s love for the phone and that she wouldn’t take anything less than the real thing. We have had a number of call backs from friends who thought we were trying to reach them, when in reality, it was Smera checking out the speed-dial function!

All these antics mean we are usually very careful to lock the phones when they are left alone. But as it turns out, you can make emergency calls even when your phone is locked and it is no match for a toddler’s random experimentation.

I hope the only disruption that was caused by this whole episode was to my sleep and not to anyone who was in need of a real emergency attention during that time.

For now, Smera holds the record of being the youngest member in our family to call the police, by a long margin.