It’s 1 a.m., you’re out with your friends, and you’ve had a few too many Long Island iced teas. What do you do? Whip out the cell phone, of course.
Looking through your phone book, you decide to call your ex-boyfriend, or maybe that certain someone you’ve been eyeing in your history class. Regardless of who it is, you will probably regret that call in the morning—if you remember it at all.
Drunk dialing. It’s rampant on college campuses. But soon there may be something you can do to prevent it.
The cell phone company Virgin Mobile Australia introduced a new service in December that is specifically designed to avoid drunk dialing—or “dialing under the influence.” For 25 cents per phone number, customers can dial 333 plus the number they do not want to call, and Virgin Mobile will block that number until 6 a.m. This service is currently only being offered in Australia, but it may be added in the United States as well.
“It’s under consideration, but we don’t have any firm plans,” said Sue D’Agostino, a media contact for Virgin Mobile.
Andy Mallison, brand and marketing director for Virgin Mobile in Australia, said the service is “going extremely well.”
“We have about 50 people per day using the service, which is far better than we expected,” he said.
The service has the potential to be popular if introduced in the U.S., Mallison added. Virgin Mobile has a similar target market—18 to 30-year-olds—in both Australia and the United States, and “this service fits right in the middle of that group.”
With the new service, sophomore Doug Keith could have avoided an embarrassing late night phone call.
“Freshman year, I was really drunk on a bus ride,” Keith explained. “I got it in my head that I would call my ex-girlfriend and tell her off.”
Keith called his ex-girlfriend’s home number instead of her cell phone, however, and ended up yelling at her dad after mistaking him for one of her friends.
And Keith is not alone. According to a survey conducted by Virgin Mobile, 30 percent of drunken calls are made to ex-partners, and 19 percent are made to current partners. Of the 409 people surveyed, 95 percent admitted to making drunken calls, and 54 percent of them did so as often as one to three times during a single night out.
Junior Kate Abramson said she “would readily invest in the service to avoid the trauma of seeing who I called the next morning.”
Abramson already uses Virgin Mobile, so the service would be at her disposal if and when it becomes available in the U.S. But Abramson did not think that it would be worth it for someone to switch phone companies for the service if they did not already have Virgin Mobile.
“Drunk dialing is a very accepted and expected occurrence,” Abramson explained. She added that it can be avoided simply by taking away a drunk friend’s phone—which does not require changing phone companies.
Keith said he would not use the service to avoid drunk dialing because “it’s more fun if you just let it happen.”
But for some, the consequences of drunk dialing are not always fun. “A guy in my fraternity called his girlfriend, got in a fight with her and told her to have sex with every guy she saw in Chapel Hill. And then he broke up with her,” sophomore Henry Colen said.
When Colen’s fraternity brother called his girlfriend the next day to chat, Colen said, she asked if he remembered breaking up with her the night before.
He, of course, did not.
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