Opinion

When drunk, leave the phone alone

Drunk dialing leads to regrets, rough morning after

By Matt Kearney

Posted on Jan. 21, 2005, at 12:00 a.m.

The worst thing about waking up from a night of being black-out drunk is not discovering that I defecated in my trashcan again or learning that I may have acquired yet another venereal disease, but scrolling through my cell phone’s call log and finding out all the embarrassing drunk dials I made over the course of the night.

Anyone who owns a cell phone and drinks an exorbitant amount of alcohol – meaning most college student, can relate to where I’m coming from. For some inexplicable reason, when the beer starts flowing, cell phones emerge from the pockets of drunk people everywhere.

Drunk dials are made to all kinds of people: girlfriends, boyfriends, friends, family members, exes and some people even report calling their bosses or co-workers.

There are two kinds of drunk dials: Those you remember and those don’t. Perhaps the worst are the drunk calls you actually remember the next morning, the recollection of these conversations is that much more embarrassing. In hindsight, they are embarrasing because you know exactly all the stupid and embarrassing things you said.

If you check your phone the next morning and see a few calls that you don’t remember dialing, the key is to check the call timer – if your phone supports this function – because the timer tells you the nature of the phone call. Say you called your ex-significant other and the timer said the conversation was only 10 seconds, most likely you got their voice mail and did not leave a message. Now that’s not too bad. Obviously you were calling for either a ride home from a bar, a booty call or all of the above.

Now if that same timer reported that it was a five-minute or longer conversation, than that’s probably a good sign, too, because you probably asked for a ride home, got denied, but than had the presence of mind to at least maintain a conversation for a few minutes, so you didn’t look too desperate.

The worst are the conversations that last between 30 seconds and two minutes, because you either called and left an awkwardly long voice mail or the person answered and definitely did not want to talk to you.

Drunk dials have become such an epidemic that Virgin Mobile of Australia have installed features on their newest phones that allow for people to enter numbers onto a “blacklist” which then doesn’t allow them to call these numbers during night hours.

So, the next time you wake up in a pile of your own vomit and can’t remember half the night, the first thing you should do is kick that stranger out of your bed and then check your cell phone’s call list – because if you called your boss in a drunken stupor you probably shouldn’t even bother showing up for work – you’re probably fired anyways.

Matt Kearney is a senior journalism major who lives a boldly hedonistic lifestyle.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 21st, 2005, 12:00 am. You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS feed.