The Drunken Blog

This weekend I will be getting wasted.  My weekend starts tonight, on a Thursday.  You see, I just got my first raise at my newest job, a paltry 2.3% raise, which is a mere .2% over the projected inflation for the year.  My raises were larger in both percentages and actual dollars when I worked at Circuit City, and those were biannual, which meant I got two of them per year.  And while I’m always glad to be making more money (it works out to about one extra night per month of moderate drinking at a bar), I’m pretty pissed off that it is such a little amount.

Not that I’ve been here that long but I start to get a little worried when you can’t match a retailer with raises.  On top of that, I have just been told that I need to come in for the second Saturday in a row.  Last Saturday turned out to be a 12 hour adventure.  This Saturday should not be as bad, but I will have to come in earlier, which basically blows my Friday night.  They are giving me off Friday, which means that my weekend, if you can call what I am getting a weekend, starts tonight.

This is not something that can be dealt with by going to happy hour.  I need to go out and do it up right.  Happy hour is great for the normal day to day stresses that you get.  I’ve said many times before that drinking is a great way to cope with stress from work.  Self medicating truly is the way to go.  Especially when alcohol so much cheaper than seeing a therapist and paying for prescription drugs, unless you just forgo the therapist and go straight for the prescription drugs, but for some odd reason your insurance probably won’t cover the cost of meds from that guy you know on the street.

After an especially long and hard day at the office (that’s what she said!) I like to grab a drink, or ten.  Bars know that people like me can’t cope by normal means after a day of work; they know they have the magic solution to fix all of our problems.  That’s why places have happy hour specials.  Unlike going out for the night, there are so many options that working schmucks have.  Unlike at night, when you are just getting off of work, you are sober (enough) to drive anywhere you want.  If the happy hour deal sucks, you can just go home and drink by yourself.  Of course, that could be considered a sign of alcoholism, but we don’t like to talk about that.  Maybe if you miss happy hour you can cope by doing something more constructive, like kicking your dog.  At least then people won’t call you an alcoholic (unless of course, you are drunk when you kick your dog).

Happy hour specials range greatly.  I’ve been to places where for an hour bottles of Bud Light and Miller Lite were $.25.  I’ve gone to places where every 30 minutes or so the price goes up.  I’ve been to places with free chips and salsa, I’ve been to other places that have free wings, but charge for their chips, I’ve even been to places where the drinks are free until the first person used the bathroom.  The norm seems to be slightly less expensive drinks with something salty for you to munch on as a way to coax you into drinking more cheap drinks.

No happy hour special will be able to appease me tonight.  You see, the primary motivation for going to happy hour versus going out at night is intrinsically different.  When you go to happy hour, it is truly to decompress and unwind, to drink away the problems of the day.  When you go out for the night, as Chris says, girls are either looking for money or dick, and guys are looking to give it to them.  Tonight I will attempt to multitask.

Other posts by Justin

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2007 at 2:06 pm and is filed under rant, friends, bad times, alcohol . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.