The Importance of a Designated Driver
Most students in college try and make the most of their experience. Obviously some people do not, but I believe that most people do. One of the things that might be included in “the full experience” is going out to parties and getting drunk at least once.
I will be completely honest, when I entered college, I didn’t really have this desire mostly because my heart was set on playing sports in college and that was all I could think about.
Halloweekend broke me though. I experienced going to college parties with friends. I will admit it was somewhat fun, but not something I would want to do every week. I also was not under the influence because I had class the next morning and did not want to start drinking then, but to be honest, I think it was fun to watch interactions between people who were under the influence.
I wrote this post to talk about the importance of the designated driver. Because I am somewhat lame, I read the news… a lot and I like to read about people our age, good things and bad things. Sadly, that does mean I have read a lot of stories about teenagers getting into car crashes after believing that they were sober enough after a party to drive themselves and sometimes also their friends home. There are also the stories of people walking home after parties that are under the influence and they end up getting lost or hit by a car because their sensory of out of place, which is sad.
Two summers ago, I would have never wanted to get my drivers license, mostly because I lived in a place where it is crazy to drive around in the summer because it is full of people who do not watch where they are going, creating madness and during the school year, I attended a boarding school where I was not allowed to have a car anyways. But thinking about college, strangely enough, becoming a designated driver did come into play. I was happy that I ended up getting my license once I got it, and being a DD was not the only reason, but it was certainly amongst the list.
I mean just the other night I brought my friends to someone’s house and the driver in front of me was drunk, but I did not realize that until I began driving but he had a bunch of my friends in his car, but I watched him closely in case anything was to happen, even though he was swerving at the time. I ended up picking my friends up that next morning at around 3:30 and there was yet again a car in front of me that the driver was a bit tipsy because he was swerving, but he ended up stopping and I stopped next to him, but then he ended up speeding away and back to school. I did follow him and he did not crash, but it did make me a little nervous because yet again, some of my friends were in that car. I later took care of my friends for a good hour before going to bed around 4:30 when I had to get up for a 8:00 work shift, but it is okay, I was somewhat functional, haha.
So now that I am in college, I have told my friends that I would be happy to be their designated driver whenever they need one. Sure that might make it so that I might not get some sleep on some nights, but to be honest, a bunch of them live on my floor and they wake me up when they come home anyways with their loud noise level and I am a super light sleeper. Also, I would much rather that they get home safely then reading in the news about something bad happening to them because they did not have a DD and it went badly.
