WHEN Colin drank too many birthday shots on an empty stomach at an East Village bar, he blacked out and two friends carried him home.
What could have been just another forgettable night, wasn’t, thanks to a “friend” who snapped digital photos of wasted Colin being propped up by his pals.
“It was the worst picture,” moans the 27 year-old Williamsburg resident – but not as bad as what followed.
Colin’s friend e-mailed the photo to his workmates, who printed it and plastered it all over their offices. It zoomed via cyberspace to friends of friends, ended up on a few blogs and even Friendster.
His lousy, liquor-induced headache only pounded harder as he suffered what might be called a digital hangover.
“The digital bit made it worse because the photos were so easily transferable,” Colin says.
Until recently, party animals only had to be cautious of drunk dialing, made even more common with the explosion of cellphones.
The phenomenon got so bad Down Under that Virgin Mobile Australia created a blocker to prevent customers from calling certain numbers. Too bad the service wasn’t available to Pat O’Brien, whose explicit voice mails spread over the Web.
Now, after a few martinis, people also need to be wary of drunk texting (or IM-ing), drunk digital photos and drunk-downloading from iTunes.
Kiss-and-tell pix are embarrassing, but photos of other shenanigans also leave party people with red-faced e-memories.
One Manhattan woman woke up to find photos in her digital camera of her and three friends stuffed into a Hula-Hoop.
That was silly, but racier incidents may cause real damage.
Case in point: The local corporate employee who traveled down South for business.
One night, a group including married men, headed to a bar where a cocktail waitress offered test-tube shots from her mouth and cleavage.
The night got raunchy – all captured on a cellphone camera.
Back home, their high-tech hangover took the form of a Monday spent fruitlessly trying to get the snaps. “They were mortified,” says the employee.
In some cases, a word is worse than a thousand pictures – from late-night booty calls via BlackBerry to abbreviated love vows sent over cellphones.
Joe Praino, a comedian, admits he’s a “huge” drunk texter – mostly to his ex-girlfriend.
“I have amazing revelations,” he says. He types them into his phone, and away they go.
Inebriated 3 a.m. calls used to end with a furious hang-up, but Praino’s scrambled musings are preserved indefinitely.
Come morning, Praino, 25, realizes his message wasn’t so amazing after all.
“Our biggest problem is we’re afraid of being ‘typical,’ ” was the result of one wild night of text.
“I don’t even know what that means,” he now admits.
Some digital drunks annoy friends and lovers. Others abuse their credit cards.
After a few cocktails too many, Max Leavitt, the Mohawked frontman of New York punks the Hurry Up, had an impulse to buy the “Sesame Street” theme for a neighbor’s kid on iTunes.
“I woke up the next day and was like, ‘What the f- – -‘,” says Leavitt, 26. “I forgot I had downloaded it and saw ‘Sesame Street’ next to [hard-core band] Minor Threat.”
Another New Yorker, too embarrassed by bleary-eyed iTunes sessions to reveal her name, downloaded Vanilla Ice’s “Ice, Ice Baby” and other guilty pleasures – at 99 cents a shot.
“Every time I get drunk, I come home and download stuff,” she says. “The next morning, there are absolutely ridiculous songs on the computer.”
Some people are instigators rather than victims. Musician David Poe is a master of taking drunken digital photos.
He once passed his camera to an audience at now-closed Fez.
“The camera was returned at the end of the night, full of drunken portraits and several pictures of intimate body parts,” he says.
In today’s brave new world, it’s best to shut down the computer, cellphone and digital camera if you’ve been perched on a bar stool for any length of time. If you need help, ask your friends – or Max Leavitt.
“I have to take my friends’ phones away,” says Leavitt. “They thank me the next day.”