There are some days I believe my phone has a mind of its own. It's a really good phone I'm happy with, but it does things that raise my brows. It has put me in such interesting types of trouble that the explanation that it's got its own mind makes me seem crazy.
Perhaps it was around 10 PM. A friend who happened to be a neighbour then was telling me about pepper and the level of hotness. Being the dietician that she is, the education lasted a while. Maybe we branched into other topics, but it wasn't a one-to-one discussion like we thought.
At some point, I began to get many notifications on my phone. It wasn't until a call came in that I realised that I had been sending voice notes to a group chat.
My colleagues knew that their class governor rarely sends voice notes, let alone making one seven minutes long. The entire conversation was sent in different voice notes. And people were trying to let me know that I was accidentally sending them.
I deleted them all immediately. No time to check time. But then, I wondered later, what if we had been discussing sensitive matters? Or what if she was my girlfriend and I was professing my love in one thousand and one words, promising half my kingdom?
What made it even more embarrassing was that my colleagues made jokes about my phone and how such had happened before. But that one was entirely my mistake then. This time, I had no idea the voice notes were happening. Perhaps it was when it was in my pocket, and that doesn't surprise me any more. I have made calls that I didn't intend, just with my lap. But I eventually realised where the problem could be coming from.
There's a type of senser that tells your phone how close it is to your face, so it can decide whether to turn off the screen. It's called a proximity sensor, and phones generally have it somewhere around the front camera. But mine doesn't exactly have it and uses other ways to determine how close it is to my face or when it is in my pocket. The problem with it is that it isn't accurate, and that explains "the mind of its own."
To prevent accidental movements like that, I put a lock on my WhatsApp. And that helps because whenever my phone's about to make accidental movements, it has to unlock WhatsApp first. But that somehow requires me to do the same for every other app. Instead, I adjusted the lock settings.
"Raise to wake" and "double-tap to wake" seem to contribute to the problem, and since my phone doesn't exactly measure well, I just turned them off. Now it's been a very long time since I sent accidental messages.