Your phone numbers, a warning
Friends, I might be suffering from a medical condition similar to sleepwalking but far more embarrassing and awkward the morning after and deals significantly more damage to the sufferer’s dignity. Simply put, upon reaching a certain level of drunkenness, I whip out my phone and send SMS to almost EVERYONE on my phone book. Worse, upon reaching an even higher level of inebriation, I end up whipping out my laptop to send messages to random friends on Facebook. Most of the time, this isn’t a problem as the people I end up sending SMS’s and Facebook messages to are close friends who know me as someone who likes to dick around a lot when I’m drunk and simply scratch their heads and brush my messages off. It sometimes becomes a problem because of the fact that, creepy as I am, I have managed to amass a contact list of over 500 phone numbers—if we met in a conference 3 years ago and you handed me a business card, chances are that I still have your number. I have the numbers of people from high school I haven’t spoken to since. Worse, I have really old phone numbers of people I don’t even remember meeting (mostly girls—whose listings on my phone only appear as first names). And, like you probably have already guessed, I sometimes end up sending messages to these people too. Again, to be clear, the messages I send are mostly silly stuff like “yo” or “sup”, but sometimes I get slightly creepy and send out that occasional “what are you doing? I’m at home, wanna drop by for a drink?” There should be no issues with this if the recipient is a friend I speak to regularly; but, if it’s like a CMO of a company I met on a business dinner back in 2006, not so much. Anyway, I was knocking back a few bottles at home by myself early this week. To cut the story short, the next morning, upon checking the sent items on my phone and my facebook account, I was greeted with two interesting message logs that both read like a lost season of Grey’s anatomy—both were a tale of a complicated romantic web replete with dialogues on the indignity of a struggling relationship. The kicker—both SMS and Facebook exchanges were between myself and men. The moral of this story: Do not, ever, trust me with your phone number. Doing so will only result in a clusterfuck of shame and awkwardness for everyone involved.
