I’m easily entertained. Easily delighted. And often get overly excited about the smallest things. This, as my loved ones I’m sure would attest, is both a good and bad thing. This evening as we were messing around with our phones and some new devices I picked up I had health on my mind.

In a moment of irritation I recalled the “Health” app that was added in one of the recent major updates. I opened the folder marked “Necessary” on my home screen. It’s a catchall folder for things I don’t know what to do with and things I don’t want but apple won’t let me get rid of. I pressed the little white icon with the littler red heart to take a look at the app that, previous to that moment, I had treated with complete indifference. I had been pretending that it didn’t exist, mostly because I saw no reason for it.

That all changed when I surveyed the icons at the bottom of the app. In the bottom right corner there’s a “Medical ID” tab. I’d go to great lengths to explain it, except it is pretty much just what it sounds like. It allows you to enter medical information to be used in the case of an emergency. You can add as much or as little information as you’d like and there’s an option to make the information viewable from the lock screen. That’s all awesome and well and good and I added information about my high blood pressure, my medication, and my blood type. But this is the clever, the thing that made me turn it on and made me want to write this post. You can add an emergency contact who can be reached while the phone remain locked.

Now I’m not going to get all preachy. I won’t tell you that if you were my loved one I would want you to activate that function just in case something happened. I don’t care. It’s your phone. Your life. Do what you want. Except that I totally think you should turn it on. I’m sure there are any number of excellent reasons you should, but the two that stand out to me?

First, if you lose your phone the person finding it will be able to call your emergency contact and return it. Let’s face it we’ve all misplaced our phone at some point even if we haven’t lost it entirely. This really could have come in handy a few months ago when my kid left her phone at the train station. It was picked up by the staff who had no way to contact the owner and someone had to endure a long ass lecture upon picking it up. Not because the phone was lost, but because it was found and they had no way to contact me.

Second, and clearly most important, if you wake with total memory loss not knowing who you are or the identity of or your relationship to anyone else on the starship on which you’re zipping through space at least you’ll know who to trust in an emergency.

Hey, it could happen.