From our original archives! Please forgive any old links and formatting quirks.

Haven’t we come up with enough ways to make cheating easy? Gone are the days when a wife would pick up the house phone, listen to the heavy silence on the other end, and scream at her husband, “THAT WAS HER, WASN’T IT?!?!” Now cheaters can use cell phones, multiple email addresses, Gchat, AIM, and covert Facebook and Twitter messages and status updates to communicate with their jump offs. Is there really a need for us to be held even LESS accountable for our romantic and sexual indiscretions?

Apparently, yes. Those damn cheaters are never satisfied.

Enter TigerText, a new controversial iPhone and BlackBerry app that enables you to send text messages that will be deleted from your phone, and from the recipient’s phone, within a set amount of time that you determine. TigerText promises that you’ll be able to “send texts that don’t live forever.” Although I really hope that no one is surprised when, after you make a million dollars, screen shots and digital camera photos of those “deleted” texts suddenly show up on TMZ (the creativity of the spurned is endless – remember those billboards??).

You should know that the app was supposedly NOT named after Tiger Woods and his harem of lady friends, but after actual tigers and their…lying, cheating ways? Whatever.

My first instinct is that this is a lose-lose idea.

If you’re the cheater, then you’re going to have a lot to explain when your girlfriend (or boyfriend – I know, I know, women cheat too…it just seems so much less common!) skims through your iPhone, looking for your Weather Channel app, and instead comes across TigerText. And if you’re only cheating with one girl, then tough luck. Your girlfriend is going to convince herself that you’re cheating with fifty.

If you’re the mistress, then you’ll have to deal with TigerText’s constant reminder that what you’re doing is illicit and wrong. That may be hot and exciting for the first few weeks, but it WILL get old. And no matter how many sexy TigerTexts he sends, he’s still not going to leave his wife for you.

If you’re the one being cheated on, well, this sucks on so many levels that TigerText can’t even touch. Lose the jerk.

As a non-cheater, I’ll admit that I’ve sent some texts that I would have LOVED to erase. Mostly the ones where I was drunk, desperate or unsuccessfully trying to be funny. But at the end of the day, I’m willing to own those texts, in all their awkwardness. Maybe if I didn’t want them to be out there, then I shouldn’t have sent them. Is that really such a novel concept these days?

Mar 11, 2010

0 F-YEAH! F-YEAH!