How champagne and cell phones do not mix!

The Australian government spends hundreds-of-thousands of dollars on advocating the dangers of driving under the influence of alcohol. I would like to see a new push espousing the dangers of dialling while under the influence. The campaign would be called: “If you drink and dial, you’re a mobile idiot.”

According to India’s president of the National Human Rights Council, Subhash Gupta, SMS messages such as “U4ME” are the cause of numerous divorces, and are against Indian etiquette and culture. Here in Australia, we too are happy little SMS’ers, but it’s mostly females who are the culprits. And we get worse the more we drink.

Or we get better. Darn it, now I’m confused. Like SMS’ing isn’t confusing enough already, with its own unique and creative language. Learning the hideous art of mutant jargon is fraught with danger. What normal person understands “QT ~:o 1chu” really means “Cutie baby, want you?”

I haven’t met any mobile-toting female yet who hasn’t committed the social faux pas of sending lame SMS messages after a couple of champagnes. The more champagne imbibed, the cheekier the SMS, whether it be to wanna-be lovers, anonymous crushes, sometimes even a random flirty message flung into the ether in a modern-day version of the message-in-a-bottle.

Be it a message sent once, or 48 times in a five-hour period, it seems funny while champagne is bamboozling your sense of humour. You may even brag about it to your friends – “And then I texted him when I was drunk! Ha ha ha ahah haa.”

But from experience, I know that all it leads to is the crippling knowledge that “something” happened last night, but the champagne black-out is doing the block-out trick, and all one is able to do is cringe under the doona with the Next Day Blues.

You know you’ve really stuffed up when you get nothing but a blank look when you apologise for your behaviour the next morning. This means your messages have gone to the wrong person entirely, which is easy to do – champagne driven fingers are renowned for keying in wrong numbers or searching through the address book with careless abandon.

Which in turn opens a whole new can of worms. Assuming you can even remember what messages you wrote, who did you send them to? The absence of a “sent” folder means that once the “Message Sent” icon appears on your screen, you have no tangible proof of where it went, let alone leaving a traceable path of what the message actually contained.

So sending a message like “Luv ya long time G.I. Me so horny!” to Dave is fraught with danger if Dave is only one step away from “Dad” in your address book.

Or, a “Good meat in aisle 7” misdirected alert to girlfriends could mean a) they miss out on the opportunity to ogle a handsome number at the supermarket, b) somebody out there (rightly or wrongly) thinks you’re a hornbag, or c) somebody out there is wandering the aisles of Coles looking for the good meat in question.

So what is the solution? I suggested to a friend, a particularly bad offender for drink-dialling, that she hand her phone to her responsible host upon arrival at a party. The host would hide the phone until such time Sandra could prove her sobriety, no matter how many hours (or days) it took. This solution worked fine.

Until the host got drunk and used Sandra’s phone instead of her own and sent drunken SMS’s to the whole world.

Sandra has since been added to the subscriber list for “SMS Anonymous”, “Sex Addicts Support Group” and “Big Bad Toy Boys”, with no clue of how to unsubscribe.

For drink-drivers, the fallout of their transgressions could be a fine, or jail, or a lifetime of soul-crushing guilt.

But for drink-diallers, we’re looking at ostracism from friends, guilt for triggering marriage break-ups, or a lifetime of daily messages from big bad toy boys looking for some fun.



Hey, wait a minute. That can’t be all bad, can it?

End
© 2002 Anita Ryan