Blue poles... Can they help us?

Chances are, if you've been on Temple's main campus, you've seen the blue poles that are strategically placed on corners and on the outer rim of campus. The idea for these blue poles is to keep the students safe. If a student runs into trouble, the idea is that they can get to the closest blue pole and press the help button. They will then be patched through to campus security.

Now this sounds like a great idea at first but when I witnessed it being tested, it turned out to be a horribly innacurate system. One day in mid-September, my mother, accompanied by my sister decided to pick me up from school after my last class instead of me taking the train. When my mother drove down part of eleventh street, her car broke down right next to one of the blue poles. Hoping to get a jump from campus security, my sister walked over to the blue pole and pressed the "help" button. After pressing the help button my sister pleaded her case to no avail. The receiver of the call did not even know where my sister was. My sister than tells the receiver which pole number she is at to the response of, "where's that?"

"Are you serious?" my sister asked before walking tot he closest corner to figure out which intersection exactly she was at. Even after telling the receiver where she was at, it still took someone with a hand held battery 10-15 minutes to find us. A campus worker driving one of those trash collecting vehicles arrived before hand and tried to help us.

What I would like to point out by making this blog is that our security system is so outdated that they don't even know which pole has had the button pressed nor where the pole even is. I find this extremely disturbing and am very thankful that I do not reside on campus.