There’s an app for that – just not the one you think
If you’re looking for something to brighten up the feeble, anaemic ‘summer’ we’ve been subjected to this year, sometimes the old ones are the best. ‘Florida man’ for example. Who knew there were so many headlines for incredibly bizarre stories that feature the words ‘Florida Man’? So many that a popular game a few years back was to type those two words into a search engine along with your birthday.
Paddy’s day: ‘Florida man arrested for pretending to be in the Wu-Tang Clan, defrauding hotels.’
25 December: ‘Florida man worried about vampires burns down his house, police say.’
3 February: ‘Florida man with Florida tattoo on forehead arrested for calling 911 to ask for ride home.’
17 June: ‘Florida man streaks into woods after destroying restaurant urinal and stripping naked.”
11 July: ‘Florida man with no arms charged with stabbing man with scissors.’
6 September: ‘Florida man arrested after trying to cross Atlantic in hamster wheel vessel.’
At this point, it’s probably worth noting for those of us mourning the lack of solar rays in Ireland over the past two months or so that Florida, home to this madness, is known as ‘The Sunshine State’. Just saying.
In the absence of sunshine, you can find yourself spending even more time than you might have planned looking at screens, especially if it’s also lashing with rain outside. Another story which caught my eye, that doesn’t feature Florida concerned Texas, which was hit by Hurricane Beryl on 8 July. Over 1 million utility customers in Houston were left without power. Unfortunately for them, the local utility company, CenterPoint Energy, doesn’t have an app that provides information to customers about power outages in the city.
But that didn’t stop some resourceful people in Houston from finding alternate ways to track the prevalence of power outages across the city, according to a story in Newsweek. How? They decided to use the app for Whataburger, a fast food chain with 127 stores in the Houston area, instead. The app allows people to see a map of the locations of Whataburger stores In the city. If the store is open, it has an orange logo, but if it’s closed, the logo is grey.
They deduced that if a location was open, it was probably drawing power from the gird, which meant there was electricity in that area. If it was closed, it probably meant there was no power in that area.
Twitter user BBQBryan, who came up with the idea, posted: “The Whataburger app works as a power outage tracker, handy since the electric company doesn’t show a map.”
The Whataburger account replied: “Well there’s a use for our app we didn’t think of! We hope you and everyone else are okay!”
Downloads of the Whataburger app have experienced a significant boost, rising from 40th in the iOS App Store food and drink category three weeks ago to 16th.
Whether those downloads will result in more custom at the open Whataburger locations remain to be seen but there are people in Houston who are going to be satisfied customers of the app even if they’ve never eaten any of the company’s burgers. The same is unlikely to be true for Centerpoint Energy.
And yes, in case you were wondering, there’s a Florida Man power outage story: ‘Florida man climbs cell phone tower, disconnects power’.
There’s a Florida man burger story too: ‘Florida man arrested after slapping girlfriend with cheeseburger, deputies say’. Where he got the said burger is not stipulated. There’s a very bad taste pun you could make on the Whataburger name but as he is also accused of pulling her hair and kicking her down the stairs, we won’t go there.
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