Even if you don’t like where you live, or have doubts about your neighborhood, I can almost guarantee you your situation is not as bad as Wayne Dobson’s. This poor soul from North Las Vegas is the victim of an inaccurate GPS system from Sprint, and the Find My iPhone app, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reports.
All around the clock, furious people frequently come and request their lost/stolen iPhones from him, even though he has nothing do with it, and is completely innocent.
They brandish the Find My iPhone app, yell at him, and often call the police. All this because of a pretty serious glitch Sprint hasn’t sorted out yet, and even now nobody knows for sure where the problem lies.
I took the liberty of creating the above photo as something he could stick outside his door, and I reckon it would be a much more effective method of deterring people from yelling and calling the police.
Dobson describes how it started and even how the police were wrongly sent to his house:
Dobson’s misadventure started in 2011, with a knock on the door around midnight on a weekend. He opened the door and found an upset young couple demanding that he turn over their phone. Dobson was confused.
“I’m standing there and I’m thinking, ‘What are they talking about?’ ” he said. “They might as well have said, ‘Give me my horse back.’ ”
[…]
About two weeks later he was awakened at 4 a.m. by a person prowling along the side of his house. Dobson followed a flashlight beam to his bathroom window. When he looked out, the person flashed the light in his face.
“I screamed at him, ‘Who are you? Get out of my yard!’ ” Dobson said. “And he said, ‘We’re the police, open the door.’ ”
North Las Vegas cops had received a 911 call from a woman on a cellphone who was arguing with a man. The argument was escalating, but dispatchers weren’t able to get a location from the woman…they looked at the location of the phone and sent officers.
He also described other similar events, including when four youths started banging on his door at 2:30AM. Scary stuff.
Perhaps even more worrying is Sprint’s incompentence. A police spokeswoman said that they ‘relied’ on the accuracy of Sprint’s information, while the spokeswoman from Sprint stated that they would ‘get to the bottom’ of it and see if it was indeed their fault.
Cellphone and communication experts Ben Levitan and John B. Minor thought that it was a problem at Sprint’s switchboard, and not with the mast near Dobson’s home that was the source of the problem, but Sprint has yet to find an official reason.
For now, all Dobson can do is wait and hope that the media attention he is now gaining will go some way to solving the problem. However his problems are probably not completely over.
