It’s Story Time! The Syndesy app has plenty of great uses. We wanted to share some stories with you to give you inspiration on how you can use Syndesy to make your life safer, healthier, and more connected.
Use Syndesy to Create an Emergency Network
The Emergency Network
Lori and her five closest friends do not live in the same neighborhood. They live in various neighborhoods all over the city. They are young, single and dating, so they created an emergency network using the Syndesy app. They are each other’s emergency contacts and they take that role seriously.
Young and social, all 6 friends actively date. They make sure to connect with prospective dates via the Connections Portal in the Syndesy app, and they make sure to journal their concerns and any anecdotes they want to share.
Where did I leave it?
They all use the Check-Ins Button. It sure came in handy last week when Lori left her earpods in the thrift shop and could not remember where she had been. Her Check-Ins report let her retrace her comings and goings, and when she got to the thrift shop they were waiting for her right where she had left them, on the shelf in the scarf section.
Help!
No one in their virtual neighborhood has been in a dating situation that turned sour and from which they needed extraction. So none of them have used the emergency button to call for help with an out-of-hand suitor, but only last week Lori tripped on a tree branch while running on a remote hiking trail. She realized she could not walk out of it on her own and pressed her Syndesy Emergency Button. All five members of her virtual neighborhood showed up within the hour and together they hauled her out of there.
Meet me at the hospital.
They got in a car and drove to the hospital. Lori reached out to her mother via a Connection Request, letting her mother know where she was and telling her to come to the hospital.
In the end, it was just a bad sprain, but Lori was so thankful for her Syndesy contacts who came to her rescue.
Use the Syndesy Emergency Button to Alert Your Emergency Contacts
Gramma Jeannie & the Tool Thieves
Robbed
Only days before, Justin’s grandma, Gramma Jeannie, had discovered she’d been robbed. All the tools had been taken from the toolshed out back, and it must have happened when she was home. She always kept the doors to the house locked and the alarm on, but the shed was not armed with an alarm, and the thieves had hacked open the padlock.
Emergency Button
After the police left, Justin showed her how to download Syndesy and how to press the Emergency Button in case she ever needed help. He helped her add not only himself as an emergency contact but also his two cousins, Ralph and Terri and the really cool neighbor down the way, Mr. Jackson.
The police had advised them only the dumbest of thieves ever returned to the scene of the crime. But that was cold comfort for Gramma Jeannie. Justin decided to stay with his grandma for a time as she was understandably panicked to be alone. But Justin had to go to work during the days.
I need help!
On Tuesday, while Justin was at work, the thieves returned. Gramma Jeannie was ironing when she heard them outside the house. She immediately pressed her Syndesy Emergency Button and then hid in the basement, trying not to cry or gasp.
Mr. Jackson got the call as he was lying down for a nap. He called 911 as he hurried up the road with his big barking dog, Bitsy, who was growling and lunging and making lots of noise. From her hiding place in the basement Gramma Jeannie was happy to hear Bitsy bark.
The robbers heard Bitsy coming and scattered. Mr. Jackson let them go just to be safe. Then he walked up to Jeanne’s house, and let her know she was safe but to stay put until the cops came.
Share the app, enlarge your safety net
By the time Jackson arrived, Gramma Jeannie was on her iphone sharing the app with all of her friends.
Use Syndesy to Stay Connected and Check-In During a Time of Social Distancing
The Caregiver
Family Connection.
Carlos calls his elderly parents every day at 5:00PM. Twice a week he stops by their apartment with groceries and to help with things around the house. He uses the Syndesy Connections Portal to let them know when he is coming. It allows them to accept his plans for a visit or let him know another time would be better.
One Syndesy Alert Away
Syndesy also gives Carlos the comfort of knowing that if there is an emergency, if one of his parents were to fall down or fall ill, they could alert him immediately with Syndesy’s Emergency Button and he would know exactly where they were. Had they fallen at home? On a walk in the park? Were they in an ambulance or at the hospital? When Syndesy sent him the Emergency Alert, he would know exactly where to go.
Stay Safe
Now, Carlos is worried that they are going to get the terrible virus going around. At their age they are so vulnerable to its worst symptoms, conditions that could kill them. He also worries that if he were to fall ill, there would be no one to take care of his aged parents. And worse, he could infect them.
A Community That Checks-In is an Empowered Community
“When ‘I’ is replaced with ‘we,’ even illness becomes wellness.”
-Malcolm X
Carlos washes his hands constantly and does not venture into public except when absolutely necessary. He practices rigid social distancing and has groceries dropped off at this house. He Checks-In with Syndesy wherever he is forced to go, and hopes that everyone else in his community does the same. If he can track where the infected have been, then he can know if he has been exposed. If, god forbid, he is exposed he knows he must self-quarantine and stay far away from his parents.
Use Syndesy to Record Tough Situations
The Cult of the Cruel Coach
Syndesy in the world of teen sports
All the soccer players in the region wanted to make Coach Crocker’s club team. Making that team means playing at the pinnacle of the sport—locally that is. It was shorthand for being the best. Even sitting on Crocker’s bench was an honor. College coaches showed up to watch Coach Crocker’s players and Varsity coaches felt like they had scored when one of Coach Crocker’s players was transferring to their high school.
If you made the Crocker travel team, you worked hard, you didn’t miss practice, you showed up even when injured and you tolerated some pretty harsh criticism. Coach Crocker was hard on all his players. Tough all around. He believed that he had to pound the performance out of his players, shame it out of them, scream it out of them, humiliate it out of them. And the girls who made the team knew that if they were to protest, or worse, complain, they would be summarily benched or cut. Plus, Coach Crocker was an icon and for the most part, anyone who complained would likely be scorned for not counting what was viewed as their copious blessings.
Verbal Harassment From a Coach
So when Coach Crocker commented loudly and publicly on what he believed to be the proliferation of hickeys on Gaby’s neck, Gaby said nothing. She did not correct him; she did not let him know that she had a skin condition and that the bruises were not hickeys; they were not even bruises, they were merely discolorations. When he criticized her conditioning, she said nothing. She did not tell him that she ran four miles every morning before school. She had heard that kind of response go really wrong with Yolanda. Yolanda had insisted she was running; Coach had responded that the only running Yolanda could possibly be doing was from the bed to the refrigerator. But when he screamed at Gaby that she’d better work harder on the field because she’d never get into college on her lack of intelligence, Gaby was stunned.
On the one hand, she was proud to be a Crocker player. People in the community were impressed with that. But despite what the coach said, Gaby was not dumb; indeed she recognized that while being on this team might be really impressive in her community, the big wide world had many teams just like hers. All you had to do was check the soccer stats on the internet to understand that there were many teams across the nation just as good as Coach Crocker’s. And she wondered if the coaches of all those other teams, teams with similar soccer talent, were as nasty and offensive as Coach Crocker.
Using the Syndesy Journal to Record Harassment
Gaby started using the Syndesy Journal portal to record the inappropriate conduct of the Coach at practice. After practice, she would get in the car and jot down notes on the incident and her feelings about it. Those journal entries (time-, date-, and geo-stamped) were all stored within the app for her private review at some future date if she were to need or want them. For now, Gaby was still sorting out what to do about the disturbing coach-player dynamic.
The day Coach Crocker suggested that Gaby would run faster if she had less sex with her boyfriend, Gaby decided this had to stop. Just because he was a perennially winning coach was not a license for that kind of verbal abuse. For a middle-aged male adult to be publicly riffing on his own imagined version of the sex-life of one of his teenage players was more than inappropriate. It was wrong.
Gaby said nothing at practice, but she was seething. She added her notes on this episode to what was now becoming quite a lengthy series of journal entries.
Finding Support
At home that evening, Gaby went online and found the United States Soccer Federation website: ussoccer.com. Right there on the homepage of the website was a tab for “Safe Soccer,” safesoccer.com. She clicked on the tab which led her to the menu item, “report a concern.”
And, to her delight, this is what she found:
The United States Soccer Federation, Inc. (“U.S. Soccer”) is committed to supporting a culture of compliance, ethical conduct and safety. Below you will find how you can easily express and report to U.S. Soccer concerns about any known or suspected violations of law, policy, ethics or rules regarding U.S. Soccer and its staff, athletes and organization members. Reporting such violations to U.S. Soccer supports U.S. Soccer’s commitment to a culture of ethics, compliance and safety.
The Journal as Backup
Moreover, there was an “Integrity Hotline” which purported to vet “Concerns regarding your local soccer club.” The site promised a prompt response and directed Gaby to a page that read “We want to hear from you… Let us know what’s on your mind.” Gaby felt so supported! Into the form provided on the site, Gaby wrote up a lengthy report. She was fortunate to be able to rely on her Syndesy journals to give exact dates and times of the incidents with precise descriptions that had not been compromised by time passage or the other shortcomings of human memory.
Gaby paused before pressing the red SEND button. The site advertised confidentiality and above all, a no-retaliation policy. This gave Gaby enough peace of mind to go for it. She pressed that big red button the sat down to do her homework.
Regaining Confidence
Time passed and no one at US Soccer got back to her. Gaby kept going to practice and she kept track of all untoward coaching behavior in her Journals Portal, but she suddenly felt as if she had agency. So, when the coach said something else about her sex life, Gaby told him that her private life was off-limits. Stunned, Coach Crocker, actually stopped moving and looked at her. Gaby felt as if she could hear every girl on the team holding their breath. Speaking back to Coach Crocker was basically unprecedented. Finally, he responded, and what he said was the last thing she expected; he said, “Fair enough, Gaby.”
Gaby had braced herself for an onslaught of abuse, but she realized that maybe Coach Crocker just needed some direction. And since no one at US Soccer was going to help her, Gaby decided she would take on the re-education of Coach Crocker herself.
Syndesy For Follow-Through
Gaby has stayed on the team. Coach Crocker actually took her aside and thanked her for working with him on what he calls behavior modification. But she is keeping notes in her Syndesy journal on US Soccer’s non-response and the lack of integrity with which they manage their “Integrity Hotline.” She will be writing the president of the United States Soccer Federation (USSF) a formal letter soon, and she will copy her congresswoman.
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