‘Bad Date Rescue’ app lets you schedule bogus emergency phone call

Good news, single ladies and gents. Your moms, brothers and best friends are off the hook.

Bad Date Rescue, a new app from web dating monolith eHarmony, will now perform the task of calling, mid-appetizer, to rescue you from romantic purgatory.

And with a recent Statscan study citing 3.3 million potential online daters in Canada, the odds of requiring a digital rope to pull you back to safety makes this particular bit of technology a welcome addition to any love seeker's app collection.

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"There are more than a few 'fake phone call' apps already out there," explains Andrew Liszewski at Gizmodo, "but eHarmony's Bad Date Rescue app seems to go above and beyond the call of duty" in a number of ways.

What are those ways, you might be asking, as you simultaneously check your smartphone app availability?

The first is that you can choose precisely when that phone call comes in, whether it's five seconds into the evening or an hour into your date's painstaking recreation of his life-changing trip to Laos in 2003.

The second? You can specify the emergency of your choice with a pre-programmed script — anything from an imaginary pregnant sister whose water just broke to a fake neighbour calling to inform you the building's water main broke and you'd better bring some flippers and a snorkel to fish out your worldly belongings.

"It graciously allows you to play along and to get out of that situation," Arvind Mishra, director of product management at eHarmony, tells Reuters.

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More impressively, the app will comb through your contact list and pull up the fake caller's photo if you've already assigned one.

And since an emergency phone call has become a bit of a bad date cliché, the clever eHarmony software engineers have even programmed a fake voice on the other side to alleviate any suspicion.

How much would you expect to pay for such a technological marvel? Well, unlike the figurative price of a completely wasted evening, Apple users can download the app for free.

Watch the comical video below for some horror dating stories.