Facebooking Woman Takes A Long Walk Off A Short Pier

[Mike]

The stories of people paying such rapt attention to their phones or GPS have somehow tapered off lately. There was a rash of them a while back, what with people falling into manholes or ending up on the wrong side of a continent, but we've been suspiciously without such an occurrence for some time. Did the general population somehow uniformly raise their IQ points a few notches? Did tech companies build in some kind of idiot-proof safeguard? Did one of our esteemed pharmaceutical companies develop a stupid vaccination?

Well, if any of that has indeed happened, it must not have hit Australia, where one woman decided to see if she could play out a 1950's insult in today's time by taking a long walk off a short pier. The culprit in this mishap is her smart phone and that damned Facebook app.

Senior Constable Dean Kelly of the water police said officers found her floating metres from the pier.

"She was still out in the water laying on her back in a floating position because she told us later that she couldn't swim," the Australian Broadcasting Corporation quoted him as saying. "She still had her mobile phone in her hand and initially she apologised... she said 'I was checking my Facebook page on the phone and I've fallen in'."

See, that cute picture of her niece's friend's dog eating a lovely veal shank she'd cooked that night was too important to peer away from, resulting in one too many steps on a pier and a whole lot of wet. Now, I'm no expert, but it would seem to me that if I couldn't swim, the place where I'd be most interested in paying attention to my surroundings would be on an ocean pier. Also, if this is how this non-swimming woman behaved in this setting, what level of oblivious does she reach when she's going about her normal day.

Still, if you were worried about that phone of hers, fear not.

Victoria police, meanwhile, said in a statement that there was no need for a lost property report because the woman "kept hold of her mobile phone throughout the entire ordeal".

That's the kind of dedication that is sorely lacking in the world today. Especially amongst those that should probably be exempted from the gene pool.

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