Monday, March 11, 2019

Phantom Dialing Redux

In a previous post I discussed a night in which my cell phone made four phone calls to family members (two to my wife and two to one of my daughters), all in the same hour, even though I never touched the phone to make these calls.  When the calls were made, the phone was in my pocket.
Given that my cell phone is an old-style phone without any "speed dial" feature,  it is very improbable to get even one such "phantom call" by chance on a phone like mine.  In that post I did some math to calculate that the chance of such phone calls occurring in a single hour (without someone purposely touching the phone) was something like 1 in a quintillion, or about 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Today my phone was up to its "phantom dialing" tricks again. I got a phone call from one daughter asking if I had called her, and I found in the "Dialed Calls" log of my phone that the call occurred while the cell phone was in my pocket.  Plus later tonight the same thing happened again, this time the phantom call going to my other daughter, again while the phone was in my pocket.

Given my phone's design, here are the fewest presses I can use to phone one of my daughters:

(1) First I must press the top of the right top End button to bring up the Contacts menu on my phone.
(2) Then I must press the little metal bar below the OK button twice (or 4 times) to get a row for one of my daughters.
(3) Then I must press the OK button again to bring up my daughter's phone.
(4) Then I must press the OK button again to make a call to my daughter.
(5) Then I must the press the End button to end the call.

But there are 21 different ways to press a button on the phone, so the chance of such a sequence of events occurring seems like only about 1 in 21 to the sixth power, or 1 in 85766121. The chance of two such events happening in the same day seems something like 1 in 100 trillion.

Below you can see my humble cell phone:


No comments:

Post a Comment