We’ve all been there. Someone’s organised a big ol’ night out in the week, you know you’re working the next day but you think, why the hell not? I’m sure I can handle it.
Wrong, you almost certainly cannot. This realisation only comes in the fresh light of day hangover and that’s when the regret starts rearing its ugly head.
After slamming that one warm tequila too many, it’s simple enough to pull out the ‘I’m feeling rough’ card the following day and pull a sickie, but this guy took it to whole new level to convince his employers that he wasn’t feeling 100 per cent.
In one of the latest Today I Fucked Up threads, Reddit user Oblodo explained how he really had to go the extra mile to hide his hungover ‘shame’.
Like many of these threads it’s a bit of a slog to get through but trust us- it’s worth it.
It all started off with the promise of seeing a different part of the world:
Back in 1985 I had just returned from the US as an AFS student. After school was out for the summer, I had no real plans, and had not a lot of money. I found this interesting advert in a newspaper for a youth camp in DDR in East-Berlin. It said, work 2 weeks of solidarity work with students and have one week of bathing vacation by the Baltic Sea, for a small sum of about $100.
So far, so good, though the other side of the Iron Curtain wouldn’t have been at the top of my holiday wishlist, but hey, whatever floats your boat.
It was organized by the Friendship organization Norway-DDR. I got excited and wanted to see the other side of the iron curtain, since I had just spent one year in USA. It never hurt to see the world, and DDR was not a typical tourists place one could say. I signed up. We were traveling by train, and I was the only boy in a group of 10 people. It was me, and 9 girls. We also had an adult chaperone who was a teacher at a high school and in his 50s.
Okay, this already sounds a whole lot better (bar the chaperone), and it’s about to get a bit weird and wild:
The whole trip was surreal, and I could write a book about the whole experience. We were greeted by Youth Pioneers in blue uniforms and a marching band. Since we were only 11 people and not the 100 they had hoped for, the whole thing was rather embarrassing and cringe worthy. They set us up in a camp with military style tents, and I notice that most of the other participants in this “solidarity camp” were female. One huge tent for showering and it was unisex to my shy surprise. The idea of the camp was that students filled the workers jobs so they could have a vacation. The work consisted in digging down a cable along the railroad tracks outside Potsdam. We were driven in huge military style trucks every morning, the kind they transport troops in. The third day, we had wine and a little party with some of the girls in the neighboring tents. I was 17 at the time and had only tried alcohol once before. I drank Sekt, a type of bubbly wine. A lot.
To be honest it’s a book I’d definitely read, though it wasn’t long before he seriously regretting his life choices:
The next day, I woke up to my second hangover ever. It was awful. We drove the trucks, I got sick, and puked in the truck, out of the truck and just everywhere. Not wanting to look like I could not handle alcohol, I said I had a stomach pain when we got to the work place. I got to lay down, and I continued to fake the pain. Although I must admit I was feeling pretty bad and sick, but had no pain. After an hour, one of the translators came over to me and said they were going to take me to a doctor. He worked for STASI, I later found out. Since we were guests of the DDR government, they wanted to show that they took good care of their guests. We drove about half an hour to the doctors office. The female doctors ( not nurses) with strange white hats, lead me in to a bed behind some screens and gave me a rectal thermometer.
Yikes, this sounds dodgy AF. Surely he will tell them the truth now, right?
They left me and said they would check on me in a few minutes. Not wanting to disappoint them, I put the thermometer on a lamp, and it soon showed I had a low fever. They came back and pressed on my stomach and I politely screamed. They then decided to move me to a hospital by ambulance. The same procedures were done there, but I left the thermometer to long on the lamp, and now it showed me having a high fever.
He’s pretty much on the point of no return now and the situation deteriorates rapidly:
Things went fast from there. Before I could protest, my German was not very good, I was given pre surgery medication and some strong pain medication into my arm. I was put under before I could tell them I was lying. When I woke up, I screamed ” Ich hat kein schmerz” ( I had no pain) and discovered they had removed my appendix.
Fuuuuck! Well, at least it’s not a mega important organ in the grand scheme of things. But, it gets worse:
The next 4 days I stayed at the hospital was awful. I got something called Bitter Wasser I think, to get my bowls moving. I got sent home on a plane, and they never admitted that my appendix was not infected. I did not either. So now I have a scar that reminds me that I should never ever lie about serious medical conditions, but on the other hand, I never had to fear Appendicitis if I took a long hike in the mountains… I was young and stupid.
You can say that again, but hey, we’ve all been there at some point in our working lives…though it’s safe to assume you probably never lost an organ over it.
