Texters should walk line

It’s Friday night and you decide to hit up the 9-0, The Row or a couple of random parties on Ellendale with your friends.

Waking up the next morning in the clothes from the night before, reeking of God-knows-what and not remembering exactly how your night ended is always an adventure in itself. The last thing you can clearly remember is dancing inside some sort of cage, taking shots of Patron, alcohol running down the corners of your mouth (there may have been some Smirnoff involved too) and taking gangster pictures in the bathroom. But there, lying next to you, is your glistening beacon of hope. The one thing that can help you piece together your night. Your saving grace. Your trusted cell phone.

Courageously, you decide to scroll through your outgoing calls. Crap. You had good reason to be worried about your obnoxiously drunken stupor. You called all of your exes, your boss, your current fling and your mom.

Continuing to the text messages — there it is, clear as day. Guilty again.

An astounding 55 percent of people surveyed by Virgin Mobile have experienced similar early-morning scenarios. Those surveyed said that the morning after drinking, their first impulse was to reach for their cell phone to see who they had drunk-dialed the night before.

Just as the reality and shame of the past night sets in, you begin to think: FML. With all of these technological advancements we can’t get some kind of breathalyzer system on cell phones? Am I reaching for the stars here? Why is it that alcohol and a cell phone together produce such a lethal combination of humiliation the morning after?

Technology is making it effortless for us to make fools of ourselves. The immediate communication that cell phones allow can be great when sober. But for those wild nights, cell phones become the not-so-perfect way to confess your undying love to “just a friend,” how needy you are to the person you’ve only been dating for a week or to remind your ex of what an insecure psychopath you are. Classy.

According to the Virgin Mobile survey, 95 percent of respondents claimed to have previously drunk-dialed or drunk-texted, with one-third of the calls going to an ex-lover — an ex-lover that probably wasn’t all too enthused to get a message in the wee hours of the morning.

Cell phones, when used responsibly, can be a great way to surf the web, share pictures, download music and keep in contact with family and old friends. When used with zero self-restraint, however, they operate as powerful tools of social self-destruction that foster awkwardness long after the drunken text message and/or call was sent.

Here’s the rule of thumb: If it seems like a good idea after a few drinks and it involves a cell phone, you will most likely regret it in the morning, so just say no because you want to be the exception, not the pathetic statistic.

If for some reason you absolutely can’t manage to loosen the death grip you have on your cell phone at the time of intoxication and can’t control the raging impulse within to press “Send,” then the next time you wake up on a morning after and reach for your phone, please go to fmylife.com and post your traumatic story so the rest of us can laugh at your expense.

You’ve been warned.

Nina Tyler is a junior majoring in English.