Confessions of a Human Nerve Ending

The Proximity Detector I. For the last year, my smart phone has a dumb, if not annoying, malfunction. The malfunctioning part darkens the phone while the phone is next to my ear But doesn’t lighten it when I pull it away to hang up, access the speaker, or use the keypad. It’s broken. The “proximity detector” is broken. I didn’t even know that was thing when I started researching this problem, And found that my particular brand seemed prone to this malfunction. Oh well, I thought, as I researched work arounds. I can’t hang up, so one workaround was to leave messages, which I almost always have to do, that tells people: “Hi, long message, but the proximity detector on my phone is broken so there is probably going to be a bit of silence on the end of this message.   I’ll tell you when I’m officially done leaving the message, so you don’t have listen to a lot of silence.” And then go on with the actual message. Eventually, the voice mail will fig...