An Ode to Event Crashing

Event-crashing is not for the faint of heart. It’s risky, stressful, and, honestly, entirely humiliating. And, frankly, once you’ve made it, it’s not even that rewarding. But faced with the much-anticipated peer pressure your parents so frightfully warned you about (you’re two beers deep with your friends and don’t want to go home), it might be hard to remember that there’s a reason you didn’t buy a ticket to begin with. But it’s a Friday, all your friends are going, and you’re battling a FOMO-induced drinking problem (though clearly not hard enough), so what else are you gonna do with your night? 

If you make it in, you have two options: either you remain saintly sober the whole night so you can tactically mold your narrative to fit your given audience, choose each word, each lie, with the utmost precision and calculation. Someone in a blue suit is questioning you? Tell them you saw them at last week’s food bank. A committee member? They just don’t recognise you without your glasses! Cue the gaslighting joke that maybe they need a pair themselves and promptly walk away. An ex you mocked for coming to this kind of event just a year earlier? Well, it’s a good thing exes don’t exist. 

The preferred choice, however, is to get so violently drunk that no one will doubt you’re certainly familiar with all the right protocols you were never warned about — you’re just far too drunk to respect and recall them this time. Sometimes, you forgot to buy a ticket or were too cheap, and that’s on you. But other times, God just has a vendetta against you. It’s not your fault you’ve been reduced to hopping the fence at every event because you accidentally handed a baggie of coke to the bouncer instead of your friend and got yourself banned from all future balls. Stuff happens. You’re not actually gonna miss out on showstoppers like Pi Ball because of it. Who understands a gram better than maths students? 

Event-crashing requires tact. The ability to balance trying to remain inconspicuous by spending the entire dinner service outside chain-smoking (obviously there’s no seat for you at the table), and the resulting consequence of chunning all over the bathroom floor because the queue was too long. Tact, discretion, and nicotine poisoning. 

If this isn’t enough to discourage you, bless your sunken soul, but now the question is how can you get away with it. The answer: easily. Luckily for you, the St Andrews populace has a plethora of advice to get you through the door. Now, remember that a wristband is more of a concept than it is an actual thing. Oftentimes, the right attitude will get you into the VIP section far better than any paper bracelet could. 

So remember to take the necessary precautions. You need to be careful not to give yourself up or accidentally drunkenly blab a confession to a committee member in the name of chat. The only respectable way to get caught for crashing an event is by writing an article for The Saint about it. Not that any of this is from experience.

Image from Wikimedia Commons