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Once you get out of college, you come to a terrible realization. Unlike 8:00 a.m. classes that don’t mean shit, you can’t skip work just because you were putting back Kamikazes until two a.m. one Tuesday night.
No, the world doesn’t stop because you have a throbbing head and churning, acidic stomach. You have to go to work with a hangover. And it never stops. You have to go to work with a hangover when you are 24 and 25 and 26 and 27 and it only gets worse as you get older.
Take it from someone who is 31. Going to work hungover is agony at this age. Every email is a death sentence. Every spreadsheet a labor of Hercules. Every trip to the bathroom sweet, but painful relief.
You do it, because life is meaningless and the world is heartless and work sucks and you have no girlfriend and you can’t just have one bourbon on the rocks. You gotta have two. Or three. Or four. While popping a Percocet. God, I love drinking. I love drinking so much.
But I hate being hungover. I’m sure you do, too. At least the next morning, you can take solace in the fact that some of your other coworkers are enduring the same misery as you, right?
Nope. NEP. Not a chance. A new study by that Bunsen Burner of a blog, 538, found that “Sorry, you are the only person at your office who feels like shit today from drinking last night.”
To find out how often people go to work hungover, I asked SurveyMonkey Audience to run a poll of 1,000 respondents on Dec. 11. Of the 1,000 respondents, 571 said they worked full time. The survey asked how many times per month respondents estimated they go into work with a hangover. Of those 571 full-timers, 74 percent said they never go into work hungover, and 20 percent said they go in hungover less than once per month.
That’s a whooping 94 percent of people who basically never, ever go to work hungover. What the fuck? Who are these losers? That’s some shit. I bet some people lied, because they don’t want even an anonymous survey to know about their drinking, but that’s still a whooping number. There’s a lot more blah blah data science jargon analysis in the post, but the gist of it is that at any given moment, it’s estimated one percent of the American work force is hungover.
If you are in a 100-person office, that’s one person who is hungover. That person is you. Like I said, you are the only person ever hungover at your office.