My phone's ringing...or is it?

Wonderful things occur while we sleep. Our body regenerates and our mind rests, ready for whatever the new dawn will bring. Occasionally, the night will bring strange injuries, aches and pains with no apparent origin. This morning I awoke, uninjured, to find that my mobile phone had performed an incomprehensible advancement while I slept.

While on the train to work I generally leave my mobile phone in my bag, set on silent mode so my morning commute is free from any early morning hassle or employer related work ‘disaster’. Today, my phone, seemingly happy in its leather cave, was primed to perform its new amazing feat.

Without warning, a tingling sensation similar to when my phone rings began in my right pocket. This struck me as odd as I normally carry my mobile in my left pocket. I curiously reached into my right pocket to pluck my phone only to find my wallet and thin air. This puzzled me as I was fairly sure that my wallet was not equipped to vibrate as it had no moving parts or vibrate function. This posed a number of puzzling and confronting questions:

Had my phone pulled a ‘swifty’ on me or was I perhaps going slightly mad?

Was my phone really a Transformer, capable of morphing into a wallet? No.

Was my phone capable of vibration ventriloquism? No.

Was my phone hiding in my wallet? Unless it was the size and thickness of a credit card, then again, no.

Once that was established and I had regained my composure I then wondered what would cause my leg to vibrate as if a phone was pressed up against my flesh. I had heard of ‘phantom phone rings’, where our brains are so trained to the ringtone or vibration of our phones that we falsely hear or feel them, so I decided to investigate.

Wikipedia*, the collector of human knowledge, had a section on Ringxiety which is “described as the sensation and the false belief that one can hear his or her mobile phone ringing or feel it vibrating, when in fact the telephone is not doing so.” False vibrations are not well understood and the causes are said to be neurological or psychological. Therefore, the false vibration appears to be the 21st Century human version of Pavlov’s salivating dogs.

So, along with a number of other mild disorders that our modern day population is afflicted with, we now have Ringxiety to add to the bulging list. I think that Nokia should consider this phenomenon and put a team of their brightest minds to work on designing the world’s first wallet phone for men. Most men carry a wallet and a phone so to combine them into one functional device is the next frontier of science.

I'll be keeping my eyes and ears peeled for the new Nokia Mobilet, and let my wallet do the talking the next time I head out shopping with my girlfriend.

* Wikipedia’s information should be treated with scepticism as it is written by regular joes like you and I.