My mailman Iced me.

I reached into my mailbox one afternoon and much to my dismay, I found that someone hid a Smirnoff Ice in my mailbox.

For those of you unfamiliar with the game, when you find a hidden Ice, you must immediately drop to one knee, point a finger toward the sky and begin the chug that leads to an almost certain sugar-induced coma. I believe that Smirnoff replaces the alcohol with a drug that makes the drink tasty for anyone with enough estrogen in his or her system.

At first I laughed at the situation, took a knee and drank my punishment. Then I asked around to figure out who thought of the rather ingenious hiding spot. It wasn’t my roommates. It wasn’t my neighbors. My friends wouldn’t even admit to it. This leaves only one rational explanation: the mailman did it.

I find it to be simply absurd no one would admit to this clever stunt, so I am convinced that a United States Postal Service employee Iced me. Frankly, if that’s what the USPS is up to these days, I will be happy to continue supporting it by overpaying for stamps.

It’s amazing the lengths that people will go to just to Ice someone. I once witnessed an entire house fake a gas leak so one resident would check the oven to find — you guessed it — a Smirnoff Ice. One of my friends even simultaneously Iced his girlfriend and me at Faegan’s on our mutual birthday. That’s just cold.

Ladies, I give you a lot of credit. I do not know how you drink those things. Many times I’ve seen a guy who can drink half a handle of whiskey without losing a step, but have to stop halfway through a Smirnoff. Those things are just plain nasty.

But isn’t college the time to drink all sorts of nasty things? Natty Ice drinkers, I’m looking at you. I have a few secrets to share with you about some of the beverages that you consume on a regular basis.

Take a moment and look inside your red Solo cup for a moment. Now take the pong ball out and look again. Look across the table. Your opponent looks vaguely familiar. Now you remember; you just saw him a few minutes ago while you were both relieving yourselves outside — after all, you’re civilized and know that the bathrooms at parties are only for the girls.

What are the odds that either one of you used hand sanitizer? I understand if you’re sufficiently grossed out now, so you’d better wash that pong ball. Whatever you do, don’t look at the water you’re using. If you’re not the first game on the table, you can bet that it looks like it just came from Onondaga Lake or the sewer — whichever is cleaner.

At this point you flee the pong table and take refuge with your other vehicle of alcoholic demise: card games. Naturally you wind up playing Kings. Your rules aren’t the same ones that the other players are using because, let’s face it, two people do not exist on this planet that have the same rules for Kings. The only guarantee is that “Never Have I Ever” will somehow wind up taking over the game.

For me, that is the game’s biggest caveat. Whenever I look around a table at the people playing this game, I realize that there are details of their lives that I pray to God they keep to themselves. I don’t want to know how many different Kama Sutra positions you’ve tried. I don’t want to know what the strangest place you peed was. I definitely don’t want to know about your hygiene habits. Sadly, all of these questions are usually answered in a game of Kings.

I’m not dissing drinking games: I can’t honestly say I won’t wind up at a pong table at the next party. But for now, I’m focused on plotting my revenge. My mailman doesn’t have a clue what he started.

Brett Fortnam is a senior newspaper journalism and political philosophy major who will be unemployed in seven months. His column appears every Thursday until there are enough complaints to make him stop. He can be reached at bpfortna@syr.edu, but he will not respond.

Published on October 18, 2012 at 2:21 am