The drunk dial

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SUBSECTION: under the table
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P/Q: My most memorable drunken text was from a friend who wrote this at 3.13am: “I don’t love you anymore, I mean my wife.”
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Lately, my sleep has been interrupted by an exboyfriend. We don't speak anymore per se, but his phone likes to call me occasionally around 3am, the dead of night. Our breakup had left me with lots of unanswered questions, and I began seeking answers in the smallest of details. When the morning came, and after the sleep fog as past, the rationalising hat went on. He must be drunk dialing again, you think to yourself. Or maybe since my name begins with an ‘A’, I’m the lucky recipient of unintended pocket calls. Well, if he doesn’t miss me, then at least his phone does. Confirmation is had when I go to check my voicemail: a series of 10-minute long messages of euro trash beats crushing the threshold of my phone's speakers filled the available recording space.
There are some people who complain about being that guy who strangers stop on the street to ask for directions, well I’m going to complain about being that girl who is on the receiving end of drunk messages. And it’s not just dialing, but drunk text messaging, emails, Facebooking, and visits.
My most memorable drunken text was from a friend who wrote this at 3.13am: “I don’t love you anymore, I mean my wife.”
While our self-editors tend to turn off under the influence and our true-selves released, I’m happy to be on the receiving end of unabridged conversations and stream of conscious mind barfs, but not in the middle of the night please. And after years of being a one-person crisis hotline, I have noticed that we, when intoxicated, are the total opposites of our daylight selves. The inhabited become un, and vice versa, we know. But I’m talking a Jekyll and Hyde complex, where sinners become saviours, and where the dumb become smart, which phantoms out. Booze, it seems gives us voice.
For the past few years, I've been the receiver of drunken emails from one reader who sends me page-long passages on topics such as women he’s just slept with and the future of Sarah Palin’s America. And inevitable, he’ll follow up with an email the morning after to tell me he was very, very drunk and very, very sorry. I quite enjoy his email rants about nothing, and everything. Though I don't believe for a second his perfectly composed letters sans spelling mistakes and filled with paragraph indents were written under the influence. If we are opposites from our drunken-texting self, then he must be illiterate.
Ok, I’ve given a few drunk-dials as well. They were somewhere along the lines of “I hate you, but I love you,” Judy Garland cries. But I’m not going to relive those. I want to help people, like me, with drunk-dialing/texting disorders. One solution is to kindly ask your phone carrier to block you from making calls to certain people (or all people) without a special dial-in code. If your phone service doesn’t offer you this, you can do what one of my girlfriend does: “I leave off the last digit to my boss’s number on my phone. It’s the only way I can prevent myself from calling her the foulest witch in finance.” Overseas there are services that make you do a simple math evaluation before unlock your phone privileges between the hours of midnight to 6am (the magic hour when reasoning returns).

Google has stepped in too to help drunk emailers. Its Mail Goggles is your email straitjacket. You have to complete five arithmetic problems in under 60 seconds to unlock your email between designated hours. (I’m not sure my aptitude in mathematics would allow me to do this sober.)
LG also makes a breathalyzer phone, which prevents you from dialing certain numbers if your blood alcohol levels is too concentrated –any time of day.
These gadgets are fun, but also an admittance that you have a drinking problem. So I take a less techie approach to control my uncontrollable self, I delete the numbers of my formers. Their numbers may linger on the memory for the short term, but this guarantees me piece of mind when in the company of a bottle.
But, even with all these tools to prevent the true-self from speaking, it always finds a way to transmit. I sent out a drunken text of my own asking the ex if his 3am rings were intentional, even unconsciously intentional, or was his phone just foned of me? (True self translation: ‘after months of silence are you trying to reach out, or am I to continue to rationalise this and pretend your phone keeps calling me by accident?’ Ok, my drunken self and true self are pretty much in line.) I wanted answers. Apparently, my drunken text voice was an angry one.
His response was one I hadn’t factored in: “I was trying to call someone else but was epically drunk. I might have to refile you under Wong.”