But if he had been, Banquo’s warning to Macbeth, "The instruments of darkness tell us truths, win us with honest trifles, to betray us in deepest consequence," should have been ringing through his no doubt already throbbing head.
Unfortunately for the intoxicated driver, his cellphone had loaded into its software a collision alert system and after he crashed into the innocent bystander growing in the street the treacherous device had already alerted police.
A suspicious call taker suspected the driver’s offence had not been a trifling one and dispatched a patrol car, and officers did indeed discover that the driver had been drinking.
Drink-driving is, of course, illegal and dangerous and the motorist was extremely lucky to have hit a tree and not a person.
He can look forward to a long period of disqualification from driving: perhaps he should move to Queenstown, where earlier this week a driverless shuttle was used on a public street in New Zealand for the first time without the street being closed.
Or perhaps, now with much time on his hands, rather than driving places the driver could instead watch television.
Well, he would need to have his own streaming service account, following news that Netflix is putting into motion initiatives to prevent password sharing, a practice which has meant that multiple people can be watching the service’s offering at once but only one bill is being paid for the privilege.
Perhaps fines and court costs will put subscription entertainment services beyond him, and the driver might like to go to the cricket.
There too, it turns out, the instruments of darkness can betray people.
For more than a decade unscrupulous gamblers have taken advantage of the delay between live sports action and satellite feeds from host broadcasters to try to make money.
In tennis the practice is known as "courtsiding", and involves a person at the event telling someone betting remotely what just happened — typically something like a serve being an ace or an advantage point in a game being won.
While not illegal, courtsiding is definitely frowned upon by tennis authorities and it also meets with stern disapproval from cricket officials, who have deployed investigators to watch domestic cricket games for evidence of it happening here.
"Here" includes the green fields of the University Oval, where a sparse group of people assembled on Thursday to watch Canterbury and Northern Districts inflict a double dose of cricketing pain on Otago.
As unlikely as it sounds, thanks to modern communications technology you can watch sport anywhere, anytime, and you can also bet on it. It might be 4am in Faridabad but if you know a few seconds earlier than your illegal bookmaker that Dean Foxcroft has hit a six there is a potential profit to be made.
So how is pitchsiding detected? A giveaway is anyone at the ground using more than one mobile device, and given the Netflix password issue no-one is going to believe you if you claim you are watching Vikings: Valhalla at the same time as the Otago Volts.
Once more betrayed by the instrument of darkness it is out of the Oval for you, although there are probably enough nearby vantage points for any pitchsider to resume their trade.
But for all its possible betrayals, mobile technology can also alert us to matters of the deepest consequence.
In yesterday’s Otago Daily Times, directly above the article about the miscreant motorist, was an interview with Dunedin Syrian Society president Wasim Askar, who was photographed holding his cellphone in his hand.
Mr Askar, like his fellow Syrians and also the many people of Turkish derivation living in Otago and Southland, are glued to their devices anxiously awaiting news from the earthquake zone astride those two countries.
As the death toll from this week’s quake surpasses 20,000, may truthful — and hopefully good — messages reach those friends and family members.
