Messaging under
the influence

by RAF KATIGBAK

A few weeks ago, I was at a bar in New York’s Lower East Side discussing the finer points of drunk dialing. You know, that regrettable instance when you pick up the phone after say, a couple (or seven) Long Island iced teas and call your boss, your ex or your so-called best friend and slur something you will certainly regret in the morning. The discussion was spurred by one particularly soused person at the table who was about to call their ex-girlfriend with a rather pathetic plea to take him back.

“Are you sure you want to do that?” I asked. “I think you may be too drunk to dial.” Before he hit send, another friend nabbed the Blackberry out of his hand and quickly held it hostage. “This is for your own good, buddy.”

It felt like a public service announcement for drunk driving. One where it would flash-forward to future bleak scenes of regret, but instead of some highway patrolman tutting over the wreckage of a DUI, it’s a scene of friends shaking their heads as the drunken dialer snivelled on about how he was a piece of shit and there was nothing good in his life anymore to a girl who couldn’t give a rat’s ass.

But we had all been there. There’s something horrible (and wonderful) about alcohol that makes stupid things seem like a good idea. Who hasn’t woken up after a night of binge drinking in someone else’s make-up-stained muumuu with rope burns around their ankles? At that point, the table began a round of drunk dialing horror stories which ranged from calling bosses and telling them where they can stick their lousy 9 a.m. frappuccino with extra low fat soy tomorrow morning to confessing to an ex-girlfriend that it was the caller who had taken a giant shit in the fern in front of her window, and not the neighbour’s dog.

We then wondered, with all the advancements in cell phone technology, why don’t cell phones come with built-in Breathalyzers? Something that could sense the Jack Daniels fumes emitted from your mouth and then just refuse to dial. Think about all the heartache and psychic agony that would be saved! Relationships would be spared and jobs would remain intact and the world would be a better place.

Well, the battle for sober communication has made headway with the recent launch of Mail Goggles, a new experimental add-on to Google’s Gmail program that puts the sender through a timed series of simple math equations before they can send an e-mail at peak drunk times (10 p.m.-4 a.m. on weekends). In many ways, drunken e-mailing is even more dangerous than drunk dialing. The world is already at a distance when you e-mail. Without the pressure of face-to-face communication, conversing becomes abstract. You’re not saying something hurtful or lame or stupid to someone’s face, you’re just hitting “send.” Plus, with the added time to reply, you can craft an extremely cringe-worthy missive detailing the exact ways your life sucks without the other person, or a harsh alphabetized list why that person has fucked up your life and why their actions are the best argument for abortion being legal.

But then we thought, what about high dialing? Have you ever tried to have a conversation with a caller that just got suuuuper high? Unless you too are baked, it’s possibly the most frustrating thing ever. Twenty-minute, never-ending ramblings about how they think their cat is out to kill them or their neighbours are narcs or asking you what if the colour they see as blue isn’t the same colour you see as blue (is your mind blown yet?).

We need some communication filter that can tell if you were way too baked to be calling someone. Maybe the phone could play a Phish track and ask you to rate it (anything higher than “the most annoying music ever” would block dialing). Or maybe it could simply say, “Look at your hands. Have you ever REALLY taken a look at your hands?” Then if it registered you saying “WHOA!” it would hang up, since you’d be too busy exploring your hands for the next half hour that you’d probably forget that you were calling someone in the first place.

But then again, while I hate sending effed-up correspondence, I love getting drunken and high messages. In fact, some of my most cherished communiqués are play by plays of someone’s psychedelic journey. There’s nothing I like more than waking up to find a first-hand account of how “a pterodactyl picked us up into the sky and the claws came swooping out and we were also hearts and everything was bright and red and… (you get the idea)” in my inbox to puzzle over while I have my granola.

PLEASE SEND YOUR MOST EMBARRASSING DRUNK DIALING STORY OR
DRUG-INDUCED ODYSSEY TO RIFF-RAFF@SYMPATICO.CA. MY FAVOURITE
WILL WIN SOMETHING FUN (ALTHOUGH I DON’T KNOW WHAT YET).