So, some friends and I are doing the American Craft Beer Mini-Tour at Old Chicago this month. We are both almost done with our tours (I’ve got two drinks left, he’s got three left), and can knock it out with one last visit. Right now our plan is to knock it out today, except that he works the night shift, and the Air Force has this thing about people not working on airplanes while drunk, so we need to observe the “Eight Hours Bottle To Throttle” rule, which basically means hitting Old Chicago in the next hour or two.
We could wait until Friday to finish up (I believe the tour lasts until the 2nd of August, nicely giving people one more paycheck to finish up their drinks on), but we’ve had weekends where our plans imploded for one reason or another before, and there’s no telling what will happen next weekend, so we want to knock it out while the opportunity presents.
This leads us to the crux of the problem: I’m moving into a new apartment this week, and since I don’t intend to drive while intoxicated (the reality of living and working on base is that you will come within arm’s reach of a trained law enforcement officer at least once on your way back to the dorms, so getting busted would be easy enough), I was curious as to how long I would want to wait after two beers over lunch before I start using my car to shuttle things back and forth to the apartment? We’re smart, we use a DD, but I’d rather not have to figure out the logistics of getting someone else to drive my stuff for me.
Anyhow, the move-out-and-have-the-room-spotless deadline is tomorrow at 0830, so what do you guys think? Drinks then nap, drinks and get someone else to drive my stuff for me, or what? If Eight hours of post-drink rest is good enough for people to be working on Air Force jets, is it good enough for me to be operating a 2001 Pontiac Grand Am?
Two beers shouldn’t be enough to make you legally drunk unless there are some screwy laws where you are.
To keep things simple, a standard drink is considered one 12 oz beer, a shot of hard alcohol, or 5 oz wine. Each standard drink represents a blood alcohol level increase of .02 when consumed rapidly. However, your body also metabolizes alcohol at the rate of .02 (one standard drink) an hour so two beers should be completely metabolized less than two hours after you start. That never approaches the common legal limit of .08
All of this is a generalization that applies to normal sized males drinking typical types of alcohol. Females tend to be smaller and process alcohol more slowly but this is all just a rule of thumb that should be hang onto mentally.
My big thing is that the Air Force has a zero-tolerance policy towards drunk driving. Its sounding like if using a friend’s car will be too much of a pain, I can always just wait till after dinner or some such to move the rest of my stuff (incidentally, you’d be freaking amazed at the sheer storage volume of a Grand Am)
Be advised that the beers you’re drinking might not be a “standard drink”. If they’re larger than 12 oz, or have a higher than normal alcohol percentage (both of which are common for fancy brews), they might count for more. In the extreme, an Imperial pint (20 oz) of 10% beer would be as much as 4 standard drinks.
If you are that worried about this going forward, you could buy a decent consumer grade breathalyzer for about $50. They are small and tend to be pretty accurate these days. They sell them on the web or at some retail stores like Brookstone. Even lab grade breathalyzers aren’t even that expensive but they are bigger.
Well, having a DD for Old Chicago was a given, it was just a question of if we’d continue to use the DD’s services as a freight hauler to move my stuff (we went for the rest-and-finish-after-dinner route). We finished our mini-tours, got our t-shirts (and playing cards!), got my stuff moved, and nobody was arrested (hooray!)
And Shagnasty, I didn’t know you could get your own breathalyzer. That’s gotta be fun at parties.
If there’s ANY question at all, kidnap your DD to shuttle your ass around all damn day.
The acid test is: Could an MP possibly decide you’re under the influence irrespective of how it goes when you blow for him roadside? If so, and if you feel the consequences would not improve your career and your future, then really the only choice you have to make is “How to compensate the DD.”
