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[The following is an editorial column by contributor Carly Kocurek and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Austinist staff. --The Editors]
Sometime this year, you’ll be able to buy a phone that will breathalyze you. Disappointingly, the phone only breathalyzes you to let you know whether or not you’re good to drive — features that let you block your ability to drunkenly dial your ex or make ill-advised booty calls after a few rounds are available as add-ons.
This gadget will revolutionize the way we make drunk phone calls. Now, you’ll have to get one of your sober friends to unlock your phone before you dial. Or, you know, stick your phone under a hand dryer in the ladies room or something.
In any case, I can think of some more useful booze-related phone functions. For example, a phone that will not receive calls from drunk people, which would protect you in the case that your ex gets drunk as a skunk, rings you up and proclaims her love, thereby totally fucking up your emotional shit. Or, perhaps a phone that will not let you answer it while intoxicated, preventing you from slurring at your mother. Or, even a phone that locks the keypad until you demonstrate your sobriety, which will keep you from texting your crush that you “want his b00ttttty.”
To be truly helpful, this trend must expand from cell phones applications. What good is a cell phone breathalyzer going to do you when you’re completely blotto and pounding away at your laptop – your wireless-enabled laptop, in which you’ve stored all those sweet little nothings your former fling e-mailed you, once upon a time?
The problem with being so plugged in is that the opportunities to make an ass of yourself are so plentiful and so tempting. It’s not just that other people have access to me that makes the system dangerous; it’s that I have access to them. I know that pounding on someone’s door at 3 a.m. is poor form. I even know that after an entire flask of Crown Royal. It’s like knowing that the sky is blue.
However, somewhere after the fourth cocktail, a little phone call seems so harmless, an e-mail or an instant message even less so. And, no matter what it is I want — sex, love, a chance to yell at someone — I feel like I can actually go around demanding it when the demand is made via phone or web. I mean, to ask for something in person, that would be imposing, but to leave a voicemail? Surely that’s fine. And an e-mail? An e-mail is nothing. And, an IM is just like waving from across the room. Nevermind that any of these leaves a record of whatever ill-advised missive I felt a need to send between last call and brushing my teeth.
Clearly, the breathalyzer phone is just the pioneering product in what could prove to be an extremely lucrative field. We all need some way to protect ourselves from ourselves.
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One of the many, many things I love about Kurt Vonnegut is that he's one of the early pioneers of drunk dialing:
"I have this, disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone. I get drunk, and I drive my wife away with a breath like mustard gas and roses. And then, speaking gravely and elegantly into the telephone, I ask the telephone operators to connect me with this friend or that one, from whom I have not heard in years."
--Kurt Vonnegut, _Slaughterhouse-Five_, 1969
Hey man...sorry I missed the party. nokia6630
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