I learned my lesson early when it came to computers and booze. They're like wine and beer. You mix them, you regret it.
Apparently there are people who don't understand this. Enough at least for Google to create an anti-drunken e-mail device, a programme that assesses how boozy you are by asking a series of maths questions before letting anything leave your out tray.
Only twice I've rolled in from a night out and switched on my computer.
Once, while at university, when a classmate informed me that an essay I planned to write at the weekend was due the next morning. Another when, with assorted friends and strangers descending on my flat, I powered up my iTunes.
Neither were happy occasions.
My analysis of the Chartist movement was apparently so under-researched and over-written the marker gave up halfway through, noting only I should consider a career writing trash novels. Who'd have thought academics could be so catty?
My iTunes library, meanwhile, vanished the morning after the impromptu gathering. Whether this was an act of malice or the consequences of my own fumbling, I've never found out. Somehow the latter seems more likely.
But regret is nothing if not an exquisite teacher. Now, when I'm half cut the PC's power stays fully cut.
Arriving home should be followed by hitting bed. If you manage to undress somewhere in between that's a bonus.
An anti-drunken e-mailing device? Not needed. Google can google off.
Unless, that is – and I feel I'm not alone here – they can transfer their invention to text messages.
At least I hope I'm not alone, I hope I'm not the only one to experience that searing shame when, waking up, you remember texting an ex asking to meet up "about now" at 2am on a weekday?
Or the acute embarrassment when your outbox reminds you of telling a colleague exactly what you think of them. Bad if you've labelled them a prat, worse if you've called them your best friend.
And it's not just embarrassment, it's cost.
There was a guy on my journalism course. Let's call him Dave – that, after all, was his name. He and I spent hours together in lectures, seminars, canteens, bars, his flat, my flat, strangers' flats, everywhere. On more occasions than was probably necessary we shared a bed – normally a single.
Yet what we never discussed was a strange habit where, at the spirit-induced height of high spirits, one would send a text containing simply a song lyric, to which the other would reply with the next line.
Bizarre behaviour. And costly. At 12p a text, it wasted a lot of good overdraft.
Google should forget e-mails, maps, even search engines. If they invented an anti-drunken texting device I'd snap their hands off. They would be, as I'd possibly say in a text which never arrived, my new best friends.
colin.drury@halifaxcourier.co.uk