First, let’s set the scene (it’s from a stereotypical PR intern point-of-view, but it applies to many internships!):
It’s 3:30pm on a Wednesday afternoon and you’re just settling back into the office after the standard late-lunch. Unfortunately, these super late lunches occur because…by the time you’re hungry, you realize that every other intern is already on their lunch break and God Forbid the office is intern-less for about 10 minutes. That’s why you get stuck eating at 2:30. (This is how it works in the PR world, but for you bankers, future real-estate moguls and corporate interns, 3:30pm signifies that you’ve been settled in to your cube crunching numbers for a few hours already).
Now, as you sit at your desk, all you can think about is whether or not the bar lines will be wrapped around onto 53rd street by the time you get out of the office and uptown. It’s the Ricks of NYC. That bar with an animal and a body of water in its name (let’s just keep the bar unnamed to prevent angry Wolverines, Hoosiers, Badgers and Nittany Lions from getting their panties on a bundle). What’s important is that this bar is the go-to place on a Wednesday evening. Beers are a buck, wine’s five dollars, who can complain?
The answer? It has something to do with the “Skeeps Effect.” Let’s rewind back to a Saturday night in Ann Arbor. After a night out at Skeeps, this is your typical “sorority kitchen” conversation:
Studious engineering student dressed in pjs with a backpack on: “So, how was the night?”
Drunk girl with a messy bun on her head, wearing a nice, silky going-out top with boxer shorts that replaced those skin-tight denim jeggings from earlier in the night: “It sucked. You couldn’t move; I could barely breathe. You missed absolutely nothing, I swear!”
Yet, where will this drunken girl be on Tuesday night? By the bar, purchasing two dollar tequila shots. This, my friends, is the “Skeeps Effect.” And that unnamed bar has the same effect.
Fast-forward to NYC. For the half-a-dozen New Yorkers and the rest of America who haven’t been to the infamous unnamed bar on a Wednesday night (and the hundreds of you who have), listen closely:
First of all, the only way to manage that incredibly long line wrapping around the streets of NYC is, well, to not. How about a little chat-and-cut, collegiettes? You’re bound to see SOMEONE you know, right? There is no shame in pretending to be excited to see that b**** from high school, or the weirdo who slept a few beds away from you at summer camp. What kind of stinks about this bar is that the bouncers literally let anyone and EVERYONE in. By the time you get through the door, you’ve seen your camp friend, your freshman roommate, your current roommate’s friend from high school, your current roommate’s friend from high school’s teen tour friend and the guy you worked with last summer. Overwhelming isn’t even a good enough word to describe this experience. Suffocating is more appropriate.
You finally make it to the upstairs corner where your friends have anchored themselves. Now the people watching begins. Well, people watching and fake smiling. Oh and the occasional “OMG Hi How are you? I can’t believe you are here too! What are the chances?” The chances are 99.5% and that greeting isn’t just occasional. Every two minutes, someone you’ve lived with, are friends with, know or have met passes by with a greeting. You can’t get through a conversation without starting a new one or whispering to your friend “F***, pretend I am not here.”
When you finally get a beer, you’re wishing you had about twenty more $1 dollar bills just to get you through the next few hours. This place seriously suffers from the “Skeeps Effect.” The regulars enjoy this lifestyle, heck, they live for it. They’re the ones who get out of work early enough, get to the unnamed location when it is empty and are able to be fully intoxicated to face the masses. They’re also the ones that soberly love to play a good game of “Do you know X, Y, or Z?”
We’d like to think Hump Day Happy Hour would be at a different bar where we could go with a few of our close friends. It would be intimate; we wouldn’t have to avoid “him” and fake a “hello” to her. Yet, that’s probably how the scene at the unnamed bar came to be—how the world ended up coming to this one location on 2nd avenue. Someone probably told a few friends to meet him there after work, those few friends told a few friends and the rest, well, the rest is history.
** Is it ok to admit that this post might have been inspired by my hip-mother, who I called complaining about the sweaty Wednesday night scene?