ICE stands for “In Case of Emergency”. The idea is that you put ICE in front of the contact(s) on your phone that you would want to have called if something happens and emergency personnel look at your cell phone to try to figure out who to call. I recently found a cell phone at an airport and by calling the ICE number I was able to find out the name of the person it belonged to.
You can have more than one ICE contact. One potential problem is that if you are doing security right, you lock your cell phone with a password, especially if it is used for business. On my Blackberry I can set a field called “Owner” and when my phone is locked it displays the owner information. I have my name and home number and an ICE contact there.
The history of ICE is interesting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_case_of_emergency. The mobile phone I found, made by LG, actually had a menu entry titled “In Case of Emergency”.
If your laptop was lost, does it have your name or your company’s contact information on it?
If you aren’t using ICE now, you might want to consider it. This was quite handy for returning a lost item and could be very valuable in an emergency as well.
Randy Abrams
Director of Technical Education
