There really is an app for everything. The new Police@SG app from the Singapore Police Force (SPF) allows residents and visitors alike to check crime stats, get tips on avoiding trouble, and find their nearest police station. What fun! Now, instead of idly clicking on YouTube links to help us get through the day, we can look up how many outrage of modesty cases there’ve been in the surrounding area, and guess which of our colleagues were to blame.Ironically, one of the latest updates to the SPF’s Facebook page (and it says something about Singapore that (a) such a page exists and (b) more than 176,000 people have taken the time to like it) notes that the police have received “several reports of mobile phones being stolen.” Quite how you use your phone to find your way to the police station when your phone has gone AWOL is something we haven’t yet figured out. But you can count on there being an app to help you do it.In the meantime, we’re pre-loading our phones with a recording of us yelling at our mom for not having dinner ready when we get home. We’re setting it to go off the moment anyone else so much as touches our phone (like even our closest friends get to see all the photos on there!), and we’re calling it iScream.In our more fanatical moments, we’ve even thought about doing away with our phones altogether and living a less worrisome (if also less ’appier) life. It’s like Bob Dylan wrote: “When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” No phone, no apps, no fear that our entire mobile, networking, online lives could be snatched away from us at any minute; and our lame wallpaper and lovey-dovey text messages exposed later that same week to the phone’s delighted new owner in Shenzhen.Anyway, before we throw our phones on the pyre of history and revert to sending messages taped to the bellies of street cats, we figured we’d better consult His Bobness for some more sage advice. And waddya know? A dozen or more Dylan-themed apps just bursting with quotes. And the question that worries us most? That old classic: “How does it feel? To be on your own; With no connected phone; A complete unknown.”To which the only honest answer is, “Not good at all, thanks. Where can we download some more apps?”
