A New Year's Resolve

So I'm still awake at 8am, having sobered my friend up from the comatose state I found him in outside the Marriott Haagen-Dazs.

I got a call from a friend who shall remain nameless at 2:40am, wishing me a Happy New Year and informing me that he was in fact very drunk. Very, very drunk. So drunk, he dropped his phone. Multiple times.

After talking for a while I realized that in his condition he'd never be able to get a cab, so I told him to wait at the Hyatt for half an hour while I took a cab down. At 2:45am. On New Year's Day.

I think if I hadn't called for a cab, I'd still be waiting downstairs for one to show up.

I got there after nearly an hour, and called his cell phone to find out where he was. And called his cell phone. Again. And again.

I decided that there were three things he could have done:

1) Taken a cab home and fallen asleep (in which case he would have been a real kubai)
2) Ran out of battery for his cell phone (in which case too bad I'd head home)
3) Passed out on a bench somewhere and unable to hear his phone ring (in which case he should do what I do and always set the phone to vibrate. Vibrating phone. Mmmm.)

No prizes for guessing which it was, especially since I gave it away in the first sentence of this post.

After slapping, prodding, poking and blowing cigarette smoke in his face, we finally got upright. My plan till then had been to get him awake so that I could put him in a cab to my place and have him sleep off the alcohol.

Neat. Elegant. Short.

Like all such plans, it was scuppered by inconvenient facts. Primarily that he had to pick his wife up from the airport. At 7am. In three hours.

So I modified my cunning plan to:

1) Get him upright
2) Get him moving
3) Fill him with water
4) Make him puke all the alcohol out
5) Get him back to his car
6) Send him on the way to the airport.

So off we went on a little 2km route march to breakfast, with me the sergeant and him the recruit.

Which lead me to one of life's little triumphs.

Making a regular MAJ do pushups. Me, a lowly 3SG. Telling the MAJ to drop and give me 20 pushups.

It made getting out of bed to fetch him all worthwhile.

ALL WORTH WHILE.

Along the route march, we came up with some interesting quotes (non verbatim, as I'm too tired to remember it all):

1) "I'm really drunk. Is it okay to make racist comments?"
2) "You see that girl over there? You grab the boyfriend and I'll grab the girl. It's called flanking, he'll never suspect a thing."
3) "I felt offended that a regular Singaporean couldn't get into that party cause it was full of rich ang mohs and Indonesians, so I decided to forge a pass and gatecrash it [and he did, it was a cunning plan]."
4) "No, I was pre-drunk." [when asked his condition when forging the pass]
5) "Walking around in the rain is better than choking to death on your own vomit." [when he complained that he wanted to sit down.]
6) "It's not the driving that kills you [when drunk], it's the long boring stretches where you fall asleep."

The night was well concluded (though he didn't pick up his wife in the end) when he got into his car at the Hyatt, dropped me off, and drove home. He's probably home and asleep by now.

And with any luck, in the next 5 minutes, so will I be.