previous column	deadlyhippos home	next column

Drunken Dialing Duel
5/31/05
by Clay

After ten years of popularity, the mainstream media has finally discovered drunk dialing. I believe drunken dialing finally hit the tipping point when my mom said to me in a conversation the other night,

"Have you heard about all these people who get drunk and make cellular telephone calls?"

Laughing nervously, I changed the subject. But when a woman who still refers to a cell phone as a cellular telephone has heard of drunk dialing, everyone has. Which is unfortunate because it means that all of a sudden drunk dialing has become passé. Before long your parents and grandparents will be calling you at seven in the evening wasted from too many rum punches exclaiming about their own drunk dialing. I was prepared to assign drunk dialing to the dustbin of faddish history along with skidz pants, toe rings, the lower back tattoo on women, and turtle necks when my friends Shekhar and Krishna left a series of five cell phone messages for me within three minutes of one another early Sunday morning. (My wild Saturday night of sitting in my boxers and watching the Suns play the Spurs while rooting for Steve Nash because the 27 hates him had ended approximately three hours later).

Shekhar previously appeared on deadlyhippos during my chronicle of the A-10 basketball tournament, most notably for his insistence that birds did not have blood. Krishna has yet to be mentioned, but he was my former college roommate and suffice it to stay, I've slept beside him more than any other man. Currently, Shekhar and Krishna represent the varied hopes and dreams of Indian men in America: Krishna is a doctor and Shekhar is an aspiring doctor.¹

So I'm giving them credit for thiis new twist on drunken dialing, the drunken dialing duel or Triple D. Triple D consists of the following:

1. Drunken
2. Dialing
3. Duel

But more specifically, each man places his cell phone in his right or left pocket and stands with his arms crossed in front of his chest. If a third person wishes to be involved, this person can count 1...2...3. On three instead of saying the number three the third person calls out a name, for instance "Demko."² The two combatants must then draw their phones, flip through them and see who can correctly place the telephone call first and who gets sent to voicemail. Pushing speaker phone to demonstrate the ringing sound constitutes victory.

If one of you has single button speeddial capabilities, this constitutes automatic disqualification and is grounds for a challenge of any drunken dialing loss. It also means you spend way too much time playing with your cell phone.

When you receive a drunken message from your Dad taunting your Mom over her Triple D loss, notify us and we will put Krishna and Shekhar to work designing a new druken dialing variation. Until then, Triple D away.

1. The 27 is also an Indian man but he is an unrequited failure since he is only a lawyer.

2. Theoretically, an entire room of dialers could participate. A duel can be defined expansively and consist of as many people as are drunk and willing to dial. Should there be only two participants, both duelers must agree on their proposed call target prior to the counting down and then one of the duelers would count to three.