Good story, and some valuable information there and in the responses.

Flight Following is a great service, and I'll do everything I can to
make Joe Controller's day easier when he's giving me this. I had a
thread a couple weeks ago asking about what to do if you go NORDO when
on FF, and the general consensus was to squawk 1200. Very compatible
with what people have suggested here, even thought I know it would eat
at me the whole time until I got down that the controller might think I
just 'dissed' him by dropping off frequency and FF. I figure that
the more pleasant experiences Joe Controller has with us VFR weenies,
the more likely he'll be to accept FF handoffs and keep an eye on us.
The traffic watch is really only a fraction of the value I get out of
it: knowing that I've got someone on-frequency who knows exactly where
I am already if I have to declare an emergency means that I can spend
just that much more time troubleshooting my problem instead of trying
to give an intelligible location for SAR to use when they're trying to
find my flaming wreckage.

Using fligh****ch to get a message to those guys sounds like another
good tip to add to the book, I'll have to remember that.