Wednesday night verged on mass panic in Saudi Arabia. Saudis and expatriates were scared, but they had a good reason to be: an SMS message that landed onto the memory chips of about five million phones. The punch line was no joke: “Someone dear to you has a medical emergency. Don't panic.” But it's hard not to panic, especially when so many Saudis and expatriates actually do have sick loved ones. Those who had the presence of mind to scroll down from that one-liner quickly realized that it's just another spam message – this time from the Saudi Red Crescent. The rest of it was just a webpage address: www.call997.com Moral of the story: 997 is the number to call when someone drops to the floor. But many actually did drop the moment they read the SMS – a classical case of an idea backfiring even after it sounded good in a boardroom meeting. Salman Al-Subaei's heart sank when he got the message. His mother is in hospotal. “I thought my mom had a serious relapse, and thought I should go to the hospital momentarily,” he said. “When I called one of my sisters to find out what was going on, she told me our mother was perfectly fine.” He told the Arabic daily Al-Riyadh that he wondered whose idea was it to send out a message like that. “If this were an awareness campaign, why wasn't it in newspapers or on TV?” It was even worse for Khales Al-Shammari of Riyadh. He told the Arabic daily Al-Watan that his father had to be admitted to intensive care after he passed out when he read the message at about four in the morning. He thought his family, who were traveling by road to another city that night, had an accident. The Arabic daily Al-Watan reported on Friday that the Red Crescent in the Eastern Province received a whopping 200,000 calls in 12 hours on Thursday morning. Muwaffaq Al-Biyook, director of Emergency Services Department at the Saudi Red Crescent, told the SMS campaign was meant to spread awareness and teach people how to deal with emergencies. He blamed the scare on Saudi Telecom (STC), telling Al-Watan that the original deal with STC was that a PR company which the Red Crescent had signed a deal with for the campaign should send five million SMSs between 7:00 PM and 8:00 PM on Wednesday. He admitted that the wording of the SMS caused a lot of panic, but stopped short of blaming the PR company. He also told Al-Riyadh a study had shown that only five percent of the Kingdom's residents know what number to call in an emergency. For the general benefit of our readers, here's a rundown of numbers everyone should know: Information: 933 Expatriate division at Passports Department: 992 Traffic Department: 993 Frontier Guard: 994 Narcotics Department: 995 Highway patrols: 996 Red Crescent (ambulance): 997 Civil Defense (firefighters): 998 Police patrols: 999 Electricity emergencies: 4032222
