Do You Drunk Dial?

Why is it that when we get drunk, we turn our phones into weapons by drunk dialing?

This behavior is a study in the "loss of judgment" symptom. At some point in the evening, we make two mistakes:

1. We think it's a good idea to contact a person that should be off-limits

2. We think the content, style, or tone in our message is going to be so effective



Drunk texting is an issue as well. One can only hope that they are so drunk that their text will just come across as gibberish. Luckily, when I'm drunk, I'm useless on text. Someone may get something like:

"u shodlve ceen those 50 tms u done over thr thse timees"

The legacy of a drunk text or voicemail is the pass along feature among friends. My friend Margaret got a drunk call from her ex-boyfriend. She came in to work on Monday as if she'd seen a ghost and took us all into an office and shut the door. She played the message on the phone speaker and it was basically:

"I wanna (terrible sex act X), (terrible sex act Y), (terrible sex act Z) to you." Then, after some gibberish to himself, he announced: "I'm drunk in Sarasota."

Nice of him to enlighten us, but we had figured out that last part.

My sister's friend had a strange habit of drunk dialing my parents. I'd come home to and see my parents' phone cord unplugged in their bedroom, and I knew it was because my sister's friend had recently struck.

My drunk dialing runs that gambit from over-friendliness to melancholy rambling, to entertainment:

The Emotional Call: I'll call an old friend or ex and lament about "remember when things were fun..." and talk about how things are no longer fun, and then offer a solution of how I will make things fun again.



The Poet Call: I'll ramble on poetically about surroundings-but it's never actually poetic. The last one went a little something like this: "I'm outside the diner at 4 AM, and the birds are in the trees reminding me I have to go to work on Monday, and I'm thinking of you under the blue...sky."

The Entertainer: Luckily I have a designated person for this-I sit in my room, playing guitar and then decide to call her and serenade her with some random song. Unfortunately, she saves them and plays them for me later. They don't' sound good.



Inside Jokes: My buddy and I love the Night Court theme song. So I'll get home drunk and play it for him as a message. It's bad when I try this inside joke on a girl I recently met. Usually not very cool when she wakes up and hears the Night Court theme song along with my commentary about how awesome it is.

Moment After Texting: The night I meet a girl, I'll text her on my way home, telling her it was fun meeting her and then playing my entire hand by saying: "you're super-cute" or something to that effect. My moment-after messaging sometiems occurs on Facebook as well.

Dontdial.com offers an iPhone application that helps curtail drunk dialing. You have a couple of options with the program. You can "black-list" certain contacts yourself, in moments of sober and clear thought, so that they will not be accessible between certain hours-say 10PM-5AM.

Under the "friends don't let friends dial drunk" theory, you can have a friend assign a password to certain contacts so that you have to bounce your horrible ideas off someone else before you get access. The controls work for texting and dialing.

The only issue is that if an incoming call comes from that blocked contact, it will come in showing the number. Chances are you will pick up, but at least you're the one in control because they are calling you, and not vice versa. And you can't leave a message if someone calls you.

Great products like Dontial.com's iPhone app remind me of one thing we are still responsible for: we still need to be disciplined, and want to make a change. That bad-tasting nail stuff actually does help me stop biting my nails. But I have to make the decision to use it religiously if it's really going to break my habit. Because I want to bite my nails, I just don't put that stuff on.

Have you ever drunk dialed? What horror stories do you or your friends have? How do you react when a boyfriend or ex drunk dials you? Is it a deal breaker?