Last week my watch battery died. Having given up my collection of Legos and Transformers, watches with dead batteries are about the last thing that I seem to accumulate. Since I hadn't felt inclined to go to the store, I have been using my cellphone as a "pocket watch". I was accustomed to that from my past life and it seemed like a good temporary solution. I started to question this the very first day.
As I used my phone to tell time, I was alarmed to find that my phone would occasionally be in the middle of a call when I would flip it open. Sometimes the call would have been going on for a few minutes, sometimes for almost an hour. I couldn't tell if my phone was originating the call or whether it was automatically answering an incoming call, but it always involved a "Restricted" number. As someone who despises these calls since they are generally from telemarketers, I was already distressed but in the past I had always been required to answer the phone.
With the recent news about "phone hacking", I wondered if that was what was going on here. While I am a nobody, there is always the chance that my phone number had once belonged to a somebody or that the caller misdialed, albeit consistently. Was someone trying to access my phone? Was someone activating my phone and listening in on my conversations? Having watched far too many movies about surveillance and having no trust for the entity we call "government", I had to wonder about this.
I looked for information about this on-line and found nothing (Which is an odd feeling). I called Verizon twice and was told that without a second phone to continue the discussion from, there was little that they could do except to recommend removing and replacing the battery. In fairness, I must say that Verizon customer service was prompt, friendly, didn't give me the run around, and had mastery of the English language (Hmm, maybe that should have made me suspicious too).
Anyway, I tried the battery removal trip and had some hope that this would be the fix based on how much straw was in the battery compartment. Unfortunately, this did little to fix the problem - If anything it was getting worse. By Saturday, I was ready to throw the phone away because of its misbehavior. Before I did so, I thought that I would give one last search through the menu options to see if there was anything that may be causing this. I searched through everything I could before stumbling across an option that required me to scroll down. The option was called "Fake Call". I have included a picture of it below.
After opening this option, I discovered that this option was on by default and that it was activated by pressing the speaker phone button and holding it. This is what was happening in my pocket as I leaned against things and the button, which is on the side of the phone, was depressed. It all made sense and I had no issues for the rest of the day after disabling this "feature".
My sense of triumph over my situation was short-lived. I quickly began to lament the fact that we live in a world where something like this would exist. Creating technology with inherent dishonesty as a means of enabling ourselves to be deceptive sure seems like it should be a sign of the apocalypse. Furthermore, the creation of such a thing clearly implies a significant demand for it. I believe that we should all be ashamed that there is an aspiration to make lying easier. At least it will give you something to think about the next time a "friend", date, or co-worker interrupts a conversation for an emergency call.
