MEMPHIS, Tenn. — No matter what you were doing or where you were, everyone got the same alert.
“I didn’t know about it until my professor told me about it like 20 minutes ago,” student Alijiah Bell said.
Most people knew it was going to happen but didn’t know what to expect.
“The regular tone we get for amber alerts, I thought it was going to be different than that,” she said.
The notification popped up as a ‘Presidential Alert’. But President Trump doesn’t control it as some people thought.
“If he uses it as his personal Twitter account obviously that is bad. But if it’s used for good, I have no issues,” student Sashwat Patra said.
As a matter of fact, the words ‘Presidential Alert’ were a bit misleading. The message is a part of the National Wireless Emergency Alert System. It was created after Hurricane Katrina.
“It’s good to have during emergencies. I could see it being a good think in the sense of an emergency like a terrorist attack,” Patra said.
The point is to keep everyone informed.
It uses the device we all keep on hand to make it happen.
“It just seems weird that you can always have access to me,” student Lexi Clark said.
Even though people get the point. Some say they don’t like knowing they can’t opt out of getting the alert.
The alert was originally scheduled for September 20, but was postponed to avoid confusion during a real disaster, Hurricane Florence.