When NOT to trust your phone

Sometimes your sixth sense is right. Usually that's when repeatedly disregard it. Let me explain...

I had a car pickup coming for 7am in the morning on Friday to take me to the coast and from there to the Gili Islands, a chain of three little islands off the northwestern coast of Lombok. I'm using my phone as an alarm clock on this trip. As I settled in on Thursday evening, I looked at it after I finished dinner, lingered and got home. It said 7:46pm. I definitely thought, "there's no way this can be right" and definitely proceeded to do nothing about it. I set my alarm for 6.

My alarm goes off at 6. I rouse myself and head to the shower. As I'm coming out, I hear someone outside of my bungalow yelling in, "hello?" After I collect myself, I head out where a angry man tells me that I am very late, it is nearly 7:30 in the morning. OH NO! My heart rate jumps from a resting rate to panic mode. I dearly want to get to the Gilis at this time or else it probably won't make sense to go. "Just a minute, I'm coming, I'm coming," I tell the man. "Hurry," he says. Alright! Throw all my stuff in my bag and away I go. Make it with barely five minutes to spare, after a 45 minute drive. Whew!

And, it turns out, all of this is because I turned on my phone to SMS someone, and it picked up the local time. Except it picked up the local time in Jakarta, which is not the local time in Bali. Hello, Indosat? Could you PLEASE remedy this? Thanks.