Drunk dialers beware.
Those potentially embarrassing phone calls left on a crush’s voice mail might find their way to the Web.
Drunk-dialed.com is a new Web site that lets people post their inebriated friends’ messages, funny drunk pictures and share their own drunk-dialing escapades. The site, which went up last September, now sees about 30,000 hits a month.
“It’s a place to go and listen to drunk messages and laugh at funny pictures,” said Brad Henson, co-founder and Web administrator for the site.
Drunk-dialed.com is the brainchild of Henson’s best friend, Scott Crosby. It started after a seven-minute drunk dial and the buildup of the annoyance of friends leaving drunken messages at all hours of the night on any given night, according to the site.
While the earliest calls posted on the site are from Henson and Crosby’s personal friends, the site now lists about 400 voice messages from people all over the world, Henson said.
Interested drunk-dial recipients have the option of e-mailing a recording of the message or forwarding it to the founder’s phones, provided the one forwarding is a Sprint or Cingular subscriber. Within a week, Henson said, a drunk-dialed message will be added to the site.
“You never know what you’re going to hear,” he said. “You think your friends are the craziest, and then someone will e-mail you a call and you’re like, Wow, how are they even functioning?”
Henson said they basically can group the messages received into three categories: the “I love you” calls, the “I hate you” calls, and the “I wanna hook up” calls.
“That’s basically what drunk dialing is,” he said.
Henson cautions that while some people might find the messages offensive, the site is intended to be fun.
“If you like the college atmosphere, if you like to make fun of people who are doing something stupid,” Henson said, “that’s our target audience.”
“Everything you see, we’re not really picking on people. We’re actually picking on ourselves a lot more,” said Henson, who admitted to being an avid drunk dialer and contributor to the site.
Derek Fennern, a first-year political science student, said he recently received a three-minute drunk dial message from a friend who rambled about the glory days of high school and how good the movie “American Pie” was.
“It’s funny,” he said. “It’s a good laugh to talk about later.”
Nutrition junior Adam Krause said he received a drunk dial from a summer co-worker three weeks ago. He said she was talking about “pointless nonsense” and then suddenly blurted out that she had loved him since last summer.
“It’s kinda flattering to have someone call and say, Hey, I have a crush on you,” he said
Nikki Beyer, a biology junior, said she sometimes receives drunk dials from friends. However, she said she would never post them on drunk-dialed.com.
Krause thinks differently.
“I wouldn’t really care,” he said about friends posting any messages he might leave. “If I was stupid enough to call somebody and say something I’d be embarrassed about, I think I’d deserve to be humiliated like that.”
Two years ago the Virgin Mobile company in Australia launched a service to prevent people from “dialing under the influence.”
Subscribers can dial a code and leave the number of a person they don’t want to call while drunk, according to a Virgin Mobile news release.
The company will stop calls to that number until about 6 a.m. the following day.
This service currently is not offered by Virgin Mobile USA or any other company.
“We think it’s a really cool idea,” said Kathleen Reynolds, a representative from Virgin Mobile’s public relations agency. “It’s not something we have in the U.S., but (Virgin Mobile is) considering it.”