Drunk dialing is a nasty force to be reckoned with. It’s a dangerous blow to your dignity to scroll through your outgoing calls every morning after a night of binge drinking. You see numbers you thought you erased from your cell phone and memory a long time ago, and suddenly you want to crawl into the earth and fade slowly away.

Sometimes I find myself slapping my forehead out of sheer humiliation as I scroll down the inevitable call list I made for myself after drinking a few too many beers or glasses of wine.

This is a habit I need to stop. Everyone needs to stop.

Last weekend, I woke up to find my phone taped together (it’s a flip phone), preventing me from either answering or receiving any phone calls. I vividly remember doing it. I remember as I was wrapping up my phone with tape, two other girls’ threw their cell phones at me and asked me to make their phones call-proof as well.

We laughed heartily and talked about all the asinine phone calls we’ve managed to make in our lives. One of the girls was convinced that she needs to invent a cell phone that comes equipped with a breathalyzer.

I told her apologetically that I wouldn’t invest in her invention – no matter how clever – because there were still friends back home that I look forward to rambling on endlessly with about nothing and everything.

It’s fun to leave drunken juvenile messages for people who I know will still love me in the morning. And I love receiving my friends’ three-minute a cappella performances on my voice mail where they’re telling me just how great I am and how much they miss me. If you can decipher what they’re saying, those messages can be wonderfully entertaining and enlightening.

But cell phones are like a double-edged sword. While I love communicating with the world constantly (I’m a Gemini, it’s in the blood), I have no idea when to stop and I find myself calling people I really shouldn’t call and saying things that I don’t remember or care to remember, for that matter. And while I would love to do away with my cell phone, I would feel lost without it. It’s almost like my survival tool.

I’ve had a friend call her ex-boyfriend and threaten to kill his cat Sasha (she had no real intention of doing such a thing), but she did call and she left him a message, making it permanent and absolutely undeniable.

And the second time a boy has ever told me that he loved me was in a drunken cell phone message. He called four times, over and over, each time leaving a message telling me the three words I hoped his mouth would never utter. I immediately erased all four messages and pretended like it never happened. I don’t think he remembered the next day anyway, or that’s what I keep telling myself.

But there can be exceptions to the rule. My friend Dana happened to randomly call this boy she had met a couple of times throughout her life and asked him if he thought she was pretty. He said yes and they ended up talking habitually on the phone for a while and later dated for four months until he dropped her like a bad habit.

The funniest drunk dialing story I’ve ever heard involves my friend Nikki, who woke up one morning to a phone call from the police. They asked her if she was OK and where she was and told her that she had called 911 repeatedly the night before. Sure enough, she checked her outgoing call log and she had most definitely called the one phone number that you’re really not supposed to call for fun.

The moral of the story – drinking makes you do things you’ll regret. So if your finger starts to get itchy and you want to make one of those infamous drunk phone calls, give your phone to a friend and tell them to hide it from you.

Lindsay Sainlar’s humor column runs in Thursday editions of the Herald. You can reach her at [email protected].

The opinions represented in this column do not reflect the views of the Herald, Western or the administration.