Many overly enthusiastic texters have paid the price of not paying attention to their surroundings while fingering their cell phones, but one man from Oklahoma nearly had a brush with death while he was deeply immersed in texting on his Android phone.
Tim Malone, a DJ who was on his way for a kids' birthday party gig at the OK Skateland in Chickasha, was oblivious to whatever was in front of him - let alone whatever was beside him and at his back - when he stepped into something soft, squishy and slithering on the pavement in front of Skateland.
"Adrenaline took over," Malone tells the local television station KOCO. "And then I realized it was a snake and I started kicking. Get it off."
It was not just any snake, though; the DJ stepped on a four-foot long bull snake that happened to sink its teeth into Malone's leg in revenge for him stepping on it before the snake began to slink away.
Fortunately, bull snakes are not venomous and Malone got away alive with just a couple of snake punctures on his leg. In fact, he says he does not have hard feelings for the snake and even helped capture it to take it back to safer areas. Malone says he thinks the snake was in the area because it was trying to escape the flood waters that submerged Oklahoma and neighboring states due to thunderstorms last week.
Texting while walking has quickly become a safety concern, with more and more cell phone users falling into some sort of injury because they are paying more attention to their phones than what is in front of them. A quick search on YouTube would bring up all sorts of videos of people walking into walls, lampposts and doors, falling into pools and fountains and rolling down the stairs because they couldn't be bothered to look up from their phone screens. In London, officials have even started padding lampposts for the sake of distracted walkers.
While this can seem like a puny problem compared to other distracted texting issues such as texting while driving, researchers believe texting while walking can actually be more dangerous. A study conducted at the University of Buffalo reveals that more injuries per mile occur due to texting while walking than texting while driving. This is confirmed by a related study by researchers at the Stony Brook University, who say that people who walk while texting are 61 percent more likely to veer off course.
Photo: YuMaNuMa | Flickr
