2020 had so much promise, and we all said it would be a movie, but we should’ve been more specific because its been a slow and poorly written horror movie that features a lot of coughing for some reason. Amidst quarantine we all thought, damn I miss getting blackout drunk on Wednesdays and thinking lemon drops are an excellent combo after downing ten white claws at the pregame like your name was Becky. The pandemic taught us to improvise, and the opportunity to drink with the boys came in the form of Zoom where we also took lazily taught marketing courses, while our professor figured out how to use her front camera. The Zoom happy hour was as productive as one would say is a lap dance, it gets you excited, but it doesn’t really do anything since you can’t actually touch the person. With colleges starting back up we recall our Zoom happy hours and the uncalled-for Wednesday night bottle service Snapchat story documented benders, that only impressed the club owner who just charged you $400 for an $18 Ciroc. With life finally seeming a bit more back to normal let us look back at the Zoom happy hours and let us get ready to enjoy the normal ones once again.

              The in person happy hour is the reason you convinced your parents that you should totally go to a state school in Florida, instead of using your dad’ legacy at NYU, and it seldomly disappoints. It always starts the same, after a long day of skipping class to practice your tossing skills in the frat house’s back yard, you call it a day once you’ve lost your sixth game and are eighteen Natty Lights in. You stumble home to find that your French roommate Pierre left his croissants on the dinner table so it’s time to feast. Once you’ve eaten enough croissants to create a gluten intolerance you take a shower that lasts from 7 PM to 8:30 PM, because you found a new Big Booty Mix that reminded you of your ex. Getting out of the shower with your skin more wrinkled than your sac you get dressed in your Patagonia t-shirt and flannel to look like literally every other guy at the club, but its ok your Stan Smith sneakers are newer than that of the other guys. By 9 PM the pregame has begun and Pierre is pissed about the croissants but he forgets after his fourth Svedka shot, and he begins talking about how he shouldn’t have dropped the tennis team, and how he misses having a reason to wear Dri-fit polos every day. The girls find it weird so they take their own uber, and you tell Pierre to meet you at the bar on the corner of 11^th street when you’re actually going downtown to pay $25 cover fee at a club run by Russian guys. Once at the club you drop $36 on Tequilla shots to impress the sorority girl voted most likely to appear on Barstool, and soon after the buzz begins. Swirly times have entered the chat, and your head feels like an extra on the movie Twister, and before you know it you’ve yacked on a girls heels and been kicked out of the club by Juan the Dominican bouncer. It is now 1 AM, and you ride share an uber with a guy who wants to talk about why Bitcoin should be more regulated. The next morning you wake up with what feels like an Irish tap dancing lesson going on in your head, and you open snapchat to find a random men’s basketball player posing with the Ciroc bottle you paid for, and ultimately the night can be called a great success.

Zoom drinking is never as entertaining but, shoutout to the man who gave us a FaceTime that allows for hilarious meme backgrounds. It’s the best alternative, and it’s the silver lining to another unproductive quarantine day. You woke up at 3 PM after watching some Indian guys build pools on YouTube until 5 AM, and a nice protein bar gets your day going just a couple hours past noon. It has now been four months since quarantine began and the frat group chat just sends old Snapchat memories at this point, and you just miss the old days. Luckily even though its Sunday your frat brother Tanner decides to host a Zoom happy hour starting at 8 PM, which leaves you a couple of hours to look at hot Tik Tokers that you’re annoyed live in Canada. Being home sucks and you miss playing pong all afternoon, before putting up another beer case on your totally sick beer wall, but you at least have the Zoom to look forward to. When 8 PM rolls around, you bring out the fine assortment of whiskey and Yuengling that your dad was storing for his 60th birthday next week and begin to drink like the frat star you once were. After your boy Jacob tells you all about his Tinder matches which he’s, “Tots gonna bang when this Corona thing is over”, you participate in a truth or dare game that results in you waking up in the garage at 7 AM wearing only your boxers, and as you get up to drink some water your mom proceeds to call you a degenerate for eating your sister’s goldfish and trying to recreate an AC/DC drum solo with the pans in the kitchen at 3 AM. In the end, this pandemic taught us to appreciate the little things, and though times are uncertain one thing isn’t, and that is that Zoom happy hour just can’t replace the OG happy hour.