Dialing while drunk
Misadventures with the cell phone
By Brian Wacker, Jayplaywriter
It's 1:45 in the morning. Kelly Richey, Lee's Summit, Mo. junior pulls out her cell phone and stares at it intently. Staggering to keep balanced, thoughts swirling through her mind, she ponders as to which one of her friends will be the lucky winner of a phone call from her. No, this isn't just any old phone call.
This is a drunk-dial
This is a drunk clair "Whenever I am trashed on my way home from the bar, so i just start calling people," Richey says, without even a hint of embarrassment.
Richey's tale is a very common one for college-aged students: Going out at night, drinking to the point of no return and then calling everyone in your cell phone's address book. Drunk students are binging on the phenomenon known as drunk-dial. And don't even pretend you didn't know that.
tell you don't know that "Everyone does it," says Fritz Heffinger, Wheaton, Ill., senior. "Whether it is to actually tell them something important or just speak incoherently into the receiver, it's just what you do when you're drunk."
because you know you won't have to worry about it in the morning," Probably the most awkward of the drunk-dials is the "I haven't talked to you in so long!" call. It's pretty self-explanatory. Matt Dezort, Edwardsville, ill., senior
Students seem to drunk-dial for a variety of reasons. Most common are for booty-calls, the last-ditch attempts to score some action on a given night. Booty-calls are usually made to explorers or current friends-with-benefits. No one likes to talk about booty-calls after the fact, but most students say that they are most common form of the drunk-dial. Heffinger says that the lack of shame a person feels while intoxicated makes booty-calls conducive to drunk-dialing. "When you are at that point of drunkenness, you are willing to say or do just about anything
claims to be quite a fan of this one. "It's usually to all of my buddies from high school. When I look at my phone book and see their names, I'm like 'This guy has to be awake at four in the morning.'" So why do we feel compelled to call our friends to give them the running tally on how many whiskey sours we slammed in the last four hours? Catherine Crisp, assistant professor of social welfare, has studied substance abuse. Though she had never heard of drunk-dialing, saying that the trend was probably the property of this college generation. While someone must have called someone while they were drunk before our generation, the recent explosion of drunk-dials belongs to us. Crisp thinks that the behavior can be traced to common theories on inhibition. "People engage in behaviors differently when they are drunk than when they are sober because there is a perceived absence of social barriers and social norms."
Translation: When you're drunk, there are no rules. You don't have to worry about
sounding like a jerk if you can't remember it the next day. Drunk-dialing really got its wings with the introduction of cell phones. Getting in touch with people used to be a whole lot harder. Before cell phones, students never had such instantaneous access to communicating with so many people. Not so anymore. Now you don't even have to be able to pee straight to call your ex-girlfriend at 2:30 a.m.
"You literally have a phone with a phone book listing
the numbers of all your friends just sitting in your pocket waiting to be dialed," Richey says.
Crisp says that may be one of the reasons drunk dialing has gotten so big. The combination of convenience and accessibility of the cell phone makes it almost too easy to get in touch with anyone at any time. Crisp also notes that in the college environment, there seems to be
Photo illustration by Joshua Kendall
a lack of set times when it is not OK to call each other. "Back when I was that age, if there was a call after 10 p.m., someone was either dead or in the hospital." Crisp says.
The simplest explanation is that people drunk-dial each other simply because they want someone to talk and listen to. According to Crisp, although alcohol is technically a depressant, it can have a converse effect on some people, acting as a social agent.
Richey says that the drunk-dial is much more of a way for her to express herself, although intoxicated, to her friends. "You tend to love people so much when you are drunk. So when you can't always see them and give them a hug, you call them," she says.
No matter what the motivations behind it, drunk-dialing is not going away anytime soon. Students are still going to drink and they will still want to talk to each other. Plus, they generally don't feel about the calls they make while drunk.
Heffinger says, "I have no regrets about calling people drunk. It's usually pretty funny and gives you something to talk about the next time you see them."
I was surfing the Internet the other night, wondering what kind of sex toy I'd be if I were reincarnated into one, when I stumbled across the perfect Web site for my queries. Quizdiva.com bills itself as the place to go for fun, sary quizzes. Among the questions it can answer for you are what sex position you resemble, what sport
you limit in bed, and what classic porn magazine you most take after. There's dozens more questions, aimed at guys and gals, guaranteed to alleviate your late-night boredom and make for fun conversation – and maybe more – with friends and partners.
— Joe Bant
Every woman wants to be heard when she is talking — regardless of whom they are talking to. When a woman says, "You don't hear me" to a man, especially one she is in a relationship with, his reaction might be something
8
like this: "I do hear you laby, I can repeat everything you just said." This is not what a woman means with this phrase.
pause.
Banda Thompson, Bella Plaine senior, says, "You're not caring as much as I want you to. Turn off that damn TV because what I am saying is important!" Thompson says this is what she should have just come out and said in the beginning, but tried to leave her boyfriend with a little bit of dignity so she wasn't talking down to him.
Her boyfriend, Curt Browne,
Lawrence resident, says that he understands this to mean that he is not paying attention, but in fact he thinks it's his girlfriend not doing the true listening. His response when asked what the phrase "Don't you hear me" means was "I hear you fine, but you aren't hearing my opinion on a story."
hearing it right.
Perhaps if Curt is worrying about having his side of a story heard, he really isn't listening to what emotions and feelings his girlfriend is expressing.
Jayplay 10.7.04
— Jayme Wiley