Unofficially the greatest day ever invented

This may look like an innocent street corner on a regular Big Ten campus. It usually is, but it won't be tomorrow.

"Drink until you're Irish."

That's the motto for my weekend, and I'm not alone.

It might not be March quite yet, but that hasn't stopped the great organizers of Unofficial St. Patrick's Day at the University of Illinois from planning the greatest drinking day since the day before Thanksgiving.

Tonight I will leave the Windy City and drive two hours south to Champaign, where I will join thousands of other people who are anxious to celebrate Unofficial by drinking my weight in alcohol.

Unofficial is the one day a year where kids (and adults in my case) forget about everything they have to worry about everyday, put on a green shirt and proceed to get shitfaced. Now those of you who might yawn at the idea of a college campus getting drunk, I assure you, this is not a typical .25 cent beer day. Kids wake up at 7am to get ready for this event. Kegs are tapped by 7:30 and by noon you are more likely to find someone puking on a corner than someone who could tell you directions to the quad. Illinois is a great school academically but all that flies out the window of the local watering hole tomorrow, because tomorrow is Unofficial.

Last year, my senior year, I was supposed to work at Piccadilly during Unofficial. Piccadilly is a liquor store for those of you not around here, and let me tell you working at a liquor store on Unofficial is the equivalent to working for the Janjaweed on a typical African Tuesday: it's a compelte and utter shitstorm. So last year I had only been working at this crappy job to supplement the meager pay I earned from working as the Sports Editor for the student newspaper at Illinois and I really didn't give a shit about the job.

I convinced myself that I needed to go into work that day but I could still handle drinking a little beforehand. Hell, my boss used to let us drink on the job so what the fuck does he care if I come in to work a little drunk? It's not like I'm operating on fucking Heath Ledger here, I'm selling 30 packs of Keystone to every Jane, Dick and Sally with an ID that looks 50% like the kid handing it to me.

Anyway, I went out and drank in the morning like any good student would and planned to go into work at 3pm like I was scheduled. After about 10 beers, some shots of green shit (sidenote: everything is fucking green on Unofficial, and I mean everything. T-Shirts, scarves, mittens, beer, shots, fuck even the cocaine is green on Unofficial that's just the way it is) and maybe a couple screwdrivers to get the taste of beer from the night before out of my mouth, I was well on my way to intoxication.


At this point, I'm perfectly fine to go into work but I'm starting to feel like I have other things I'd rather be doing than spending the rest of my day not drinking.

So a few friends and I head back to my house and we run out of beer after like a half hour because of course, chicks don't ever bring beer they just expect other people to hand it to them. Most of the bitches at U of I won't even open their own beers, that's how spoiled and gay they really are. So I get the bright idea to go get a keg! And what better place to get a keg than the very place that I work for, Piccadilly? It's right across the street from my apartment, shit I can practically read the time on the wall, why wouldn't I go in there? Oh yea, because I have to be in there for work in 3 hours. Does that stop me? No. I head on over with the intentions of buying a keg.

I apparently was more drunk than I thought because as we walked into the store I couldn't figure out that the door pulls open so that people delivering kegs can just back them out. Pretty smart huh? Apparently too smart for me. So I'm sitting there pushing and pushing and the door is winning by a mile, until my manager opens it, calls me a retard and asks me what the fuck I'm doing. I tell him I'm here to buy a keg, and no it's not for me, I'm just getting it for them because I'm a nice guy and that's what nice guys do.

So I wheel the keg on over to my apartment and forget that I have the little cart that we use to carry those fuckers to the cars. We only had like 5 of those carts for the whole store and there are probably about 300 kegs sold on this one day alone so that's roughly 60 kegs per cart. Well they were one light after I left because I was not about to wheel that bitch all the way back there (things tend to appear much further away when you don't need anything from them don't they?) just so my boss can call me an idiot again. I'll just bring it back later.

Long story short, or at least shorter, I never went to work, got fired and didn't bring the cart back until a week later when my boss left me a profanity-laced voicemail threatening to get me arrested for stealing property.

All in all, I'd say it was a pretty productive day. I can't really remember anything past 4pm so this is where the story ends...until I return on Sunday with more tales of the finest day of the year.

Pray for me.