Guide to Being Hungover at Work.

Being hungover at work tells you a few things about yourself. It speaks volumes about you and the fact that you’re hungover, you and the fact that you’re at work, you and the fact that you didn’t use one to stop the other. In a way it’s kind of a modern display of everyday heroism, that you have both partying and getting the job done as simultaneous priorities. It’s also a modern display of everyday dipshitism, because you almost barfed on a city bus this morning in front of a bunch of strangers who probably wouldn’t have wanted to see that.

Man, that bus ride was rough. You really were just about going to barf. You even got a few gags in there and the start of the warm droolies. That would have been a nightmare. All those people. You could maybe have pleaded severe motion sickness the way that bus driver was sadistically stopping and starting as if he was specifically targeting you and your queasy stomach, but you don’t ever want to barf on a crowded city bus if you can help it. Even if it was really caused by honest, innocent motion sickness and not stupid, complicit-in-your-own-demise you and the copious amounts of whiskey you slurped down last night. Either way, you can’t barf on a bus. Think of the times you’ve been on a city bus that smelled like barf, and remind yourself of how unpleasant that is. Multiply that by a factor of you barfing into your backpack six inches from some Polish cleaning lady’s face, and you’ve got an idea of how bad that would have been.

You’ve got to get off the bus if you’re going to barf. It doesn’t matter how late you’re running. Rules like this are important to follow, otherwise everybody would just barf willy nilly all over the place, and every single bus would be full of barfstink. And busses are bad enough already when they don’t stink like barf.

You know what’s the worst? When the bus smells like pee and you can’t tell which one is the pee seat and you don’t want to sniff your seat really hard before you sit down because if it’s the pee seat you’ll be sniffing really close to somebody’s pee, and you also don’t want to ask everybody in the bus if they know which one is the pee seat, like a big announcement of “Alright everybody, it smells like pee. Which one of these seats is the pee seat?! I don’t mind smelling pee for a few stops, I just don’t want to sit in it!” You don’t want to do that because what if the pee-er is still on the bus and he’s still in the pee seat and he’s got a knife and he’s resolved to kill the first person who mentions the pee seat? Peeing on the bus is crazy enough already. The leap in logic to the knife murderer scenario is not too big of a stretch.

So you just try to use your eyeballs for the pee seat, but it’s impossible to see semi-evaporated pee on one of those Scotch-guard bus seats. Plus they’re all already stained with some teenager's sandwich grease from 2005, so you can't tell from a quick visual if there's pee or just an old sandwich grease stain. And people are spread evenly throughout the bus. Why? Do they not even care about being in or near the pee seat? What is up with the people who live or do business near Lawrence? Are they all immune to pee? Unbelievable. There are absolutely no recognizable outward signs about which one of these things is the pee seat. All open seats are equal candidates for pee seat. So you just have to play pee seat Russian roulette and hope for the best.

God, that is the worst. If I ever peed in a seat on a bus, I would write a note that says, “Caution: Pee Seat.” Or, “In case you’re wondering from the smell, this is it. This is the seat I peed in.” Maybe even, “Obviously I hadn’t planned on the chain of events that led me to pee on this seat, and I’m very sorry it happened.” Or at least I’d leave an empty Funions bag on the seat or something so somebody would move the Funions bag and see and smell the pee and be like, “oh, pee seat.”

Even if I witnessed somebody else peeing in a seat I would write a note. “Don’t sit here unless you want pee on your butt." Or "Some weird fat guy with a beard peed here.” Maybe even "Pee Seat: 2:26am 1/27/09." You have to look out for your fellow humans and try not to let them sit in pee. It’s the least you can do. Or the driver. Where was the driver? Couldn’t somebody have mentioned “hey, that man is currently peeing?” Doesn’t the driver have some “pee seat” warning tape for emergency situations like this? What the hell? There’s no excuse for not knowing which one is the pee seat. It’s a complete breakdown of civilization. Now that I think about it.

And barfing on a crowded morning rush hour bus would be worse than not knowing which one is the pee seat. Your odds with pee seat are pretty good, after all. You have one hundred percent sure thing odds of being grossed out and horrified by the sight and smell of some dude horking last night's whiskey right there on the early bus. You're still not awake enough yet to consider this bus ride technically part of your day. Witnessing a barf would be positively indecent at this delicate hour.

Sure, maybe somebody barfs if it's late at night. That's the risk you run. People get drunk and barf and pee at night. That's fair game. In fact, you should probably have barfed on the bus last night instead of now. Would have made more sense. But witnessing a barf on your crowded morning busride you take to the job you don't enjoy? That's tantamount to somebody breaking into your house and shitting on your dinner plates and then setting the table for a romantic dinner for two while you sleep, so when you wake up there's a suprise romantic shitmeal on your kitchen table and the window's open. That's how bad of a violation it would be to have to see and smell some dude's barf on the bus during your morning commute. It'd be enough to ruin your whole day, and depending on what you're going through it might quite possibly plunge you into delusional city-fury madness for good. And we've already got enough of those guys running around peeing in busses.

So to avoid the end of days, you’ve got to do everything in your power to avoid barfing (or peeing without proper notification) on a bus. No matter how hungover you are. It’s the only thing protecting us all from total chaos.

But you didn’t barf this morning. You almost barfed, but you didn’t barf. Great job, dipshit.

Now you’re hungover at work. Work. This job you have. You’re lucky to have it, and this is how you treat it? Like a convalescent home? Like some kind of health resort where you can sit on your ass all day and drink Alka Seltzer and free ginger ale from the break room? Yes. Damn right. That’s how you’re treating it. Today at least.

This is a tough thing to pull of if you actually have something important to do, but let’s face it, you don’t have something important to do. Maybe it’s important to somebody else who’s not you, but it’s not important to you. So it’s not important. It wasn’t important enough to stop you from pouring that fifth Jameson last night. So it’s not important. Unless: it’s not important to you, but you’d probably get fired for not doing it today. Or if not fired, chastised enough and disappoint-your-bossed enough to make your work life into an unnecessarily-minute-levels-of-critique festival for a long, long time. So it’s a tough thing to pull off, mostly because you have to pull it off. There are some stakes. They’re a pain in the ass that you don’t need, but they’re stakes. Unless you don’t do anything all day anyway, and the boss is out of town this week, and you can get away with an in-service day off where you don’t have to burn a sick day but you go to work and do basically the same thing you’d do at home with a sick day, minus the sleeping and plus a collared shirt. And instead of watching a Bonanza rerun on TV, you’ve got to YouTube it. But otherwise it’s the same. In-service days off are the best. So are regular days off, though. More.

At lunchtime you are going to get pizza. Plain cheese pizza. Just really plain. But warm. Warm and bready. That’s going to be great. You might even have enough gas in the tank after that to get to work on some of this stuff you’re supposed to do before your boss gets back. Just the super easy stuff, maybe. But still.

Just make sure that pizza is super plain and doesn’t bother your stomach any. Maybe if you’re still kind of raw at quittin’ time, make yourself puke before you leave. You don’t want to do it on a bus. And you should pee too. Even if you don’t have to. As my Mom used to say before car trips, “just to make sure.” You do not want to barf or pee on a bus. Ever. That’s a person who’s relying on the kindness of strangers to get him though his day. That’s not a man who can handle his whiskey. That’s not any kind of a man. Or woman if you’re a woman. You have to be the kind of man who will drink all night and work all day and do it again the next day. Except you’re a receptionist, and your version of working all day is answering like twelve phone calls. But still. Be a man. Dipshit.