Work.Retire.Die.

It’s Friday night, the culmination of a long week of doing the bare minimum, staying up past your bedtime finishing Season 3 of You, and lying awake for hours because you can’t stop thinking about all the plot holes in Joe’s storyline.

Friday nights generally go one of two ways. Sometimes, you’ve had a boring ass week and are looking for an excuse to go out, have a couple dozen drinks, and as we say in the biz, “get absolutely shit-hammered until 4 am and wake up on your couch covered in taco bell.”  On the contrary, sometimes it’s been a long week of work, you went out a couple times for dinner or happy hour during the week and all you want to do is curl up on your couch, eat an edible, have a few beers or glasses of wine, and watch Hitch for the 25^th time.

Well too bad. The unmistakable joy you get from watching Will Smith discover the error of his ways thanks to Eva Mendes’ cheek mole and Kevin James’ undeniable charisma will just have to wait because tonight, like a fool, you made plans with friends. You could drag yourself out, but you don’t want to. I don’t blame you. Even God took a day off and he made the goddam Universe.

But your friends won’t get that, so you need to come up with a good old-fashioned excuse.

The Best Excuses for Staying in on a Friday

7. “I’m sick.”

Pretty unimaginative but a solid excuse that people won’t pry into too much. At the same time, any time someone pulls this on me, I immediately know they’re lying or exaggerating significantly. You might be feeling a little under the weather, but if you really wanted to show up tonight, you would.  I’m not gonna ask you to take your temperature and send it to me, but just know that in the back of my head, I know that you’re lying to me and I will resent you for at least 12 hours.

The worst part about this excuse is it severely limits your ability to go out the rest of the weekend. You can’t exactly hit the town on a Saturday and throw up an Instagram story from brunch after telling your friend you were sick a mere 10 hours previous.

6. “I’m too tired.”

Again, this is fair, but it does make you look like a little bitch. Sure, part of growing up is accepting that it’s ok to look like a little bitch. But you have to be aware that this is how it appears.

The thing about this excuse is that it’s weak as hell and leaves you extremely susceptible to being convinced to go out. There’s like a million solutions to the fatigue problem (coffee, Red Bull, drugs, smelling salts, etc.) that can easily be solved by persistent friends. If you’re a feeble minded person like me, you can easily get talked into at “just coming for the pregrame” and then “just coming to the bar for one drink” and then your night completely gets away from you.

5. “I’m waiting for someone who doesn’t think about me at all to potentially cancel their plans so we can hang out.”

At least this is what it sounds like to us.

There are generally two schools of thought when it comes to ditching plans with your friends to go on a date. There’s the ‘bros before hoes’ or ‘chicks before dicks’ legion that will claim anyone who picks spending time with a romantic prospect over their friends is a legitimately bad friend. These people are either extremely single and want to keep their other friends single or in toxic relationships. Let your friend find happiness my guy.

At the same time, if you constantly are picking Hinge dates over your friends on Friday nights, it gets old. People stop asking you to come out and if you do find a significant other, you’ll likely wake up one day and realize you don’t have any of your own friend and have a mental breakdown. And god forbid you break up and you realize you ditched all your friends for a person who left you for their coworker who was “totally just a friend and they don’t even view them like that.”

4. “Shit was that tonight? I totally forgot I have something else going on.”

As someone who refuses to keep a calendar, this can legitimately happen. I’ll allow it. However, all this excuse tells me is you’d rather do these other plans than ours. Why are my plans the ones that you are bailing on? Why can’t you text this ‘something else going on’ that you totally forgot you had plans with ME tonight?

We were gonna go to Dave and Busters and split a beer tube together bro. And now I’m supposed to have 100 oz of Bud Light and play Whack-A-Mole until I tear my rotator cuff by myself?  You’re breaking my heart man.  

3. “I have to work.”

No, you don’t.  You literally just got finished telling me last week about how much you hate your job and you’re probably going to quit after the bonus hits.

Use this excuse too much and you start to become the person who makes work their entire personality. No one wants to sit next to you at a group dinner when all you talk about is your job that literally no one cares about in an industry we couldn’t have less information on. You seem like the type of person who leaves their Slack notifications on loud at brunch and jumps up to take a call every 30 minutes.

You can work when you’re dead. Live for tonight.

2. “I was exposed to someone with COVID last night, I really don’t want to impact you guys.”

Almost an airtight excuse. No one will question you on it plus it makes you look super responsible and health conscious. You are single-handedly beating back this global pandemic your cautiousness and adherence to COVID protocols. You are on a short list to replace Dr. Fauci as head of the white house hospital doctors (not political but I don’t really have a grasp on what Dr. Fauci does and his exact role.)  I wouldn’t be surprised if you got a medal from the CDC, assuming they have the authority to give medals to citizens.

The only downside to this one is it kind of knocks out your whole weekend, unless you want to just lie and say you got a negative test or photoshop a fake one in case people asks. It just kinda seems like a lot of work to be perfectly honest, but a night in could definitely be worth it.

1. “Supply chain issues are impacting shipping timelines worldwide.”

Let’s take a second to have a macro view of the world. We’re in a global pandemic, the earth is melting, and to top it off, the supply chain is in absolute shambles right now. And you want me to leave my apartment and go to Top Golf on a triple date? I just don’t think it’s feasible I’m so sorry.