I don’t know how I even stumbled across the “I’m Being Assaulted Application” in the first place (I have no idea what my search parameters even were… or why they were. but whatever they were, I shouldn’t be judged on them), but what I found startled me so much that I decided to start an entirely new segment to address it.

Smart phones are incredibly dynamic, game-changing, and, every once in a while, even life-saving machines. We’ve all read stories about iPhone apps saving people’s lives… whether the story of a woman pinned inside her Toyota Camry on the side of the road (thanks to the Toyota Camry’s wonderful “auto-pilot” feature that takes over driving and crashes into things) who used an app to contact loved ones to broadcast her location, or perhaps a story of a traveler trapped in the deep, dark jungles of the Congo who’s not sure which plants are safe to eat, but learns all about it with that tropical plant app. The possibilities seem endless.

Technology is literally saving our lives (though in many other ways ruining them and making them sad and lonely… but that’s not for today). There is an app, however, whose intentions to save lives are marred by an unbelievably extensive process that will more often than not do the opposite. The app is called the “I’m Being Assaulted App.” Here it is now:

I’ll address the whole “no ratings” thing later, as it’s very important. Anyway, I hate for you to imagine this type of scenario, and God forbid it ever happens to anyone, but think for a second about a man or woman being physically assaulted in an alley by some evil, terrible person, perhaps robbing you and demanding your cash and that brand new Chase Freedom card (which is maxed out anyways… stickin’ it to the assailant).

This is one of the most horrifying situations anyone could ever be in, and it’s great that people are trying to create ways to help save you in these situations, and I’m sure these were the intentions of Adam Eisenman… Unfortunately, Adam apparently didn’t employ a single ounce of common sense when writing this app. Here’s why.

So the man in the long black coat has his gun trained on you and is waiting for you to take your wallet out.  You’re obviously jarred and emotionally distraught, but you quickly remember that you bought the “I’m Being Assaulted” app earlier in the day.

You open it for the first time only to find…. that you need to write a detailed letter to your friends in order to be saved:

It definitely seems like a brief letter (though, at the same time, ridiculously and unnecessarily repetitive and vague), and it probably would be… if you didn’t have a gun to your head. Without even addressing the extremely likely scenario in which the offender will simply take your brand new iPhone (he is robbing you after all) while you’re furiously trying to open up the app, you already have huge problems on your hands, not the least of which are… what are you going to write and who are you going to write to?

Bigger questions loom. Is the assailant going to give you the minute and a half necessary to navigate the on-screen keyboard that gives you a greater typing error rate than your great grandmother had on her first day in the 21st century? Is he also going to let you check your Facebook or e-mail (if he lets you bring this app up, chances are he’ll let you check your social networks, after all)?

Things aren’t looking good for you at this point, but we’ll give you (and the assailant) the benefit of the doubt. Let’s say you get this letter written. All you have to do is click send, right? Surely Adam made it so you could send this letter quickly to your loved ones so they can contact authorities and save your life in a reasonable amount of time. Not so fast.

You’d better confirm that! Because of course you have the extra few seconds to spare when you’re being stood up at 3 am in the alley behind that night club your significant other doesn’t know you spent the night at. There literally couldn’t be a worse time in the world to have to digitally confirm an action (and there are thousands, if not millions of terrible, annoying instances in which you have to confirm actions on computers). Adam decided this was pretty important, though. And we have no idea why.

Bottom line? We highly recommend that you don’t even show the robber your phone at all, let alone take it out, open up this app, write a letter, confirm the letter, and send it to a loved one. There is somewhere around a 0% chance that you’ll have time to do this. If you are going to take out your phone, just throw it at your assailant’s face. You stand a much higher chance.

Adam, I give your app a 0.5/10. And that 0.5 isn’t even for you. It’s for all of the folks who were smart enough not to buy it, because, if anyone did, they would have been so angry with it that they surely would have reviewed it, but there aren’t any. There is some hope for the world yet… as long as we don’t put our trust in this application.