Likening the scenario to an “OCD nightmare”, friends of Jocelyn Edwards were visibly shaken upon seeing hundreds of push notifications displayed on her phone, after she attempted to show them pictures of her nephew at dinner Friday night.
“She was all like, ‘Look at his freckles!’ but we were all just staring at all the banners,” says one stunned friend, Gloria Blum. “They came in so fast, it almost gave me a seizure.”
Several of her friends stated that the notifications weren’t designated to only a few of the apps either, but that every time they swiped to a new page of the home screen, an infestation of little red dots were revealed with higher and higher numbers in them.
“It was like a stress dream,” said friend Leanne Mikael. “A living stress dream.”
The problem only worsened when friends discovered notifications for important apps, like her bank accounts.
“I was just trying to watch Nathaniel try to do the hula hoop and the Chase alerts kept popping up, over and over,” Edwards’ friend Janine Dingman explains. “When I scrolled to the Chase app, she had 61 unread alerts. I felt very scared for her.”
“I asked her, ‘Jocelyn, do you not want to know if you’ve overdrawn, or someone stole your credit card information and they’re paying for a hot yoga retreat in Palm Springs with it, or something?’ says Dingman. “But she looked at us like we were being weird and just kept scrolling.”
Other friends of Edwards compared the sight to watching the unraveling of an elderly relative with dementia.
“It was kind of like going into that room in your grandma’s house that no one was ever allowed into, and seeing all the TV Guides and New York Times they’d secretly collected since the 1950s,” Stacey Wendt says. “If phones could get bed bugs, her phone would have them.”
Reports now tally the total at 17,341 unread texts, 541 missed calls, and what appeared to be the infinity symbol displayed on her email app.
“It was as if she hadn’t looked at her phone on years. What was she doing when she was staring at it all that time?” Wendt whispers. “I’m scared.”
At press time, Edwards’ friends were said to be planning an intervention, but were struggling to come up with a surefire way to notify her that it would be happening.
