Well, I don’t do drugs. However, I partied and drunk a lot back during my high school and college days. This was in the late 90s and early 2000s.

I’m from a country called the Philippines and we had lots of LAN cafes dotting every street. You could play games for $0.50 per hour. It just so happened that some cafes might allow alcohol or cigarettes just outside the premises.

In one particular evening, and I’m trying to remember it clearly now, my friends and I already had a lot of Red Horse beer. We were feeling the “amats” (buzz, tipsy). We had just finished playing some Counter-Strike (or maybe it was Quake) and we were in the mood for more competition.

We ended up going to a LAN shop that was further away from our neighborhood because one guy thought: “Oo pare, astig dun, maganda PC.” — “Dude, that place is awesome, the rigs there are cool.”

———-

So we head on over there, feeling tipsy and supporting one another, riding jeepneys (public transports), to a place we’ve never been to before because we were stupid, drunk college kids.

We got to this dingy street where lots of “tambays” (bystanders) with tattoos and bad looks were staring at us. We headed inside the LAN shop to play some CStrike. Since there were 5 of us, we were challenged by a group of people who were regulars in that LAN shop.

We were drunk, we were tipsy. My head was swimming. But suddenly that gaming instinct took hold and we were in the zone. We won our matches handily. Since we won, the opposing team was supposed to pay up (sort of like a winner’s purse). We got a measly $20 split among the 5 of us.

But that $20 was a lot of money in the Philippines. We exited the shop, rounded the dingy alleyways, and suddenly there was a group of tanktop and jacket-wearing people.

One had a bat. Another had an icepick. Another had a gun.

The guy with the gun pointed it alternately at our faces. We were scared for our lives. This wasn’t our part of town, and it was past midnight already. There was no one else around.

They wanted our money and our mobile phones.

————

We handed the money, and then the guy with the gun asked for our mobile phones (and these were the flip-tops and Nokia 3210s of yore, no smartphones back then).

They would either shoot us or stab us if we didn’t hand our phones.

And this is where stupidity saved us. Because we were drunk, we all left our phones in the first LAN shop we went to.

The gangsters asked us: ”Wala kayong cellphone?” — Don’t you have mobile phones?

“Kuya, naiwan namin cellphone namin sa shop sa <insert city here>.” — We left our phone in shop in the nearby city.

One of the guys just cussed us out and called us dumb for doing that. They took the money and left.

We walked home (2 hour walk) since we didn’t have cash.

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And that’s why the “Don’t you have mobile phones” meme makes me chuckle each time.

I remember that time when gaming, and drunkenness, almost got me and my friends killed... or worse...