The Most Responsible Night to Get Drunk

Holy shit, you all blew up my last post. Over 800 of you took the time to read about my journey and that is wild! I was so nervous to post that because I knew some of my coworkers would see since I have them on Facebook/Instagram or whatever but I’ve never really felt comfortable enough to talk about my job history. I honestly felt a lot of shame about it and it took me a really long time to try to be at peace with it. I still have some days where I feel really unsure about things and I start second guessing myself but for the most part, I’m really proud of my decisions.

I honestly think I’ve been watching a little too much Survivor on Paramount+ because I kept looking back at my career and thinking of it as my “game”. My boyfriend is obsessed with Survivor and he’s gotten me into it. It’s actually really cute because he knows all things survivor and knows every single thing that has happened in each episode of the 42 seasons and I’m over here trying to remember everyone’s names. We talk on the phone and I’m always trying to explain who I like and why but it’s really like a game of Who for him because I give him poor descriptions of the characters and he has to figure out who the fuck I’m talking about. Anyway, I digress. On Survivor, they’re always talking about making big moves and making sure they’re owning their game.

Sure, my career is NOT Survivor and I am not on a deserted island with no luxuries. To be clear, I would not survive even a single second on Survivor. However, I started to think about what was memorable about my career and started to piece together my actual resume to see who is Marnie Perez Ochoa? What does she stand for and what has she accomplished?

Sure, getting promoted at age 27 has got to be my claim to fame but what else? What got me to where I am today? I’m currently prepping for my first podcast interview ever. Like what?! Who am I?! My TikTok went sort of viral and this girl Megan asked if I wanted to be on her podcast that she started back in September of last year. Some of her prep questions were about how I got to where I am today and that really struck me. Sometimes we forget to take a step back and reflect and understand what went well or what didn’t go so well. So here I am, exposing my biggest flaws and failures in my life. Today, we’re gonna go into the time I got caught drinking in college.

So let’s go back to freshman year. As you know, I played tennis in college and I didn’t have to pay one single cent for school #blessed. The tricky part here was that I was so close with my coach since before college so it was hard to go from being friends to being like a player and him being the coach. There were pros and cons to this, like most things, of course. Pro: he was quite literally the only human I knew in Chicago when I moved there when I was 18 so I had a person I could trust at the very least. Con: he expected more from me that just being a player. We had a father daughter relationship and he was always there for me but one time I really fucking let him down.

The year was 2013, my freshman year spring semester at school and my best friend and doubles partner, Karyn had just torn her ACL. She is literally like 5 feet tall, if that? I actually don’t think she’s even 5 feet tall, tbh. She is quite possibly the most talented tennis player I have ever seen in my entire life. I’m not even exaggerating, she had such natural talent and above all she had the mental toughness needed to pull through tough matches. She was our clear #1 player and she went down with the knee injury. None of the rest of us were real #1s, at the time anyway. Like we could play there but even shitty teams always had a legit #1. My roommate Carynne and I had to go back and forth playing 1 & 2 throughout the season as freshmen, no less! Go us, now that I think about it. Carry was better than me, I really had no business being up in that 1 or 2 court. Anyway, we had made it through the season and at the end of the season we had the conference championships. This was the last year our school was in the Great West conference and the tournament was in New Jersey.

You know what’s close to New Jersey? New fucking York, baby! I had never been to NYC and I had never even dreamed of it. NYC just seemed like this far away fairytale land that was unattainable for regular folks like me. We were all so excited to go! Conference is always towards the end of April or first week of May, which usually lines up with the end of the semester or finals week. This year, it was during finals week so I had taken all of my finals early so that I could travel and just focus on playing — all of us had, for the most part. We got on the team bus to go to MDW and fly out to Jersey but there were threats of bad weather. We had seen a lot of other flights get cancelled and we were crossing our fingers that ours would make it out. Spoiler alert: it did not.

Our flight got cancelled literally as we pulled up to the departures section of the airport. We turned around and got dropped off back on campus. CSU has literally one singular dorm where both guys and girls live and for the most part it’s all athletes because it’s a commuter school, so the students generally live nearby-ish. So we’re sitting back at campus with quite literally nothing to do. We had no practice, we had no classes, no homework, no tests to even study for so we did what college kids do best — we got drunk.

I can’t quite remember what specific day of the week it was but for college students it doesn’t really matter what day. We were always down to drink, and tbh not much has changed, ha! I do remember it wasn’t like a weekend day, it must have been like a Monday or a Tuesday and because it was around finals, our RAs had put up fliers about quiet time or something like that. Needless to say, we were not quiet or respectful of the other students and we were blasting latin music from one of the tennis guys’ rooms. Our dorms were like two rooms connected by one bathroom like little suites and the guys from our team had one of those suites. They weren’t playing in Jersey. I can’t remember where their tournament was but I know they had a match that weekend there in Chicago. Anyway, we were drinking and playing beer pong on non-regulation size tables (no I’m not still bitter about it…) and just living our best college lives.

Long story short, the mean RA was working that night OF COURSE and she kept coming and telling us to stfu. Finally after several times of coming to tell us, they brought campus police to come into the room. I can’t remember the exact details of campus police but they were like real police not like BS campus police. I mean it was the deep South Side of Chicago so I’m not surprised. Anyway, they basically wouldn’t leave and forced their way in and we got caught with alcohol in the dorms and literally all of us were under age. College kids doing college things, amirite?

Not only did we get caught, we were escorted out of the dorms and taken to the campus police station in campus police cars. They were doing the most, to be honest, but okay. I remember not being able to walk straight when I was trying to get into the car because ya girl had had one too many shots. If you’ve ever partied with me, you know I’m the shot queen. Well I used to be, now I’m a legit grandma. So we’re in this freaking campus police station and we’re in the “holding cell” and honestly, that night is such a blur. The holding cell didn’t even have a door or bars or anything. It was just like two benches or some shit. I was very intoxicated and I needed to throw up and charge my phone. So when my phone was finally charged, I took a snapchat story. A freaking snapchat! What was wrong with me?

Finally, after what seemed like forever, my coach showed up and let me tell you, I have never been more scared in my life. This man had to drive like 45 mins or an hour even, to get to campus in the middle of the night. Disaster. They did him so dirty because they made him take us from the station to the dorms which is literally like .1 miles (if that!) and we just went back to our dorms to pass out.

The next day we were scared shitless, or at least I was. I don’t remember at what point I told my mom but we did spend most of the day in the athletic department getting fucking yelled at, and for good reason. My teammate and I were the only girls that got caught/were there long enough to get caught so our punishment was suspension from the team. Yup. This meant we couldn’t go to Jersey or NYC or play in the tournament we had been training for all year. That was our best shot at a conference championship because the following year we moved to a much tougher conference than the Great West. I felt so bad. My coach was depending on us to put on a good performance and help prove himself here. At this point he hadn’t been the head coach thaaat long and CSU hadn’t done well in a very long time. God, my stomach hurts just going back to that moment. I don’t feel like we never apologized to our coach enough for this one. I can’t believe he didn’t kick us off the team to be honest. It’s probably because I had that father-daughter relationship with him and thank God for that. So grateful I didn’t lose my scholarship. Hi coach, if you’re reading this lmao.

The season and the year ended and I felt a lot of shame and guilt. We had to do a ton of community service and we had to take this like alcohol quiz/class thing, which was honestly more painful than the community service. I went back home to Kentucky that summer and had horrible shoulder pain. I went to the doctor and it turned out that I had a torn labrum in my right shoulder. A few weeks, I had surgery on my right shoulder to repair the tear. Let me tell you, being in a sling in the summer, IN MEXICO is not it. 11/10 don’t recommend.

So what does this have to do with my career? Well, nothing and everything. When we were getting yelled at in the conference room by my coach, he said something that resonated with me. He kept saying what you do, doesn’t only affect you, especially when you’re part of a team. You have to remember that up until this point, none of us had really ever been part of a team. Tennis is such an individual sport and college is one of the first times you really get to feel like you’re part of a team. Also, for me, I grew up as an only child. I have two half brothers but they grew up in Mexico with my dad and I was in Kentucky with my mom. When I tell you I’m her entire world, I really am. Well not anymore because she’s in love with Brian, but it’s okay, I’ve learned to share. But back then it was all about me, so to go to school and learn to play nice in the sandbox was a lot harder than I realized. I felt such shame when I let my team down and I knew I never wanted to feel that way again. I never wanted to be the person that everyone hates to be in partnered up for group projects in class so I really tried my absolute best to think of the whole group instead of just myself in every situation.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not perfect and I’m not saying that I’m always selfless. I can be a needy, selfish bitch — probably a lot more than I’d like to admit (Aaron, if you’re reading this don’t say anything). This incident, as bad and traumatizing as it was, it really helped shape the way I think about things. It was also very clear that every decision that I made had a clear consequence or benefit, and usually both, and those things didn’t only affect me. Part of the reason that I’m good at what I do at work is because I am always looking for the action and the reaction to the environment in every possible way. There was a deployment to 10,000 desktops? What does that mean to me? How will that come through in my dashboards? What does this spike represent? Can we get ahead of it? What can we learn from this? Every decision impacts someone or something else. The more we surrender to this concept and accept that change is constant, the more flexible we can be when change occurs. Alternatively, if you or your team are responsible for a change, stop and think what are the potential outcomes. Are they all positive? Are they all negative? More often than not, there will be a mixture of both types of outcomes. Do the positive outcomes outweigh the risks of the negative ones? If you can start thinking two or three steps ahead, you will find less issues or unexpected surprises after inflicting change.

I’m currently part of an automation team and we have some automation products and this goes for any product really. The developers are fantastic at building things that work — they build to specifications provided by stakeholders/product owners. That’s good enough right? Wrong. There is so much that goes into making a product successful. In our case, we build things that automate manual things. Who wouldn’t want to spend less time doing manual tasks? Don’t answer that. The most common problem that we face is that sure, the product technically works but it’s not very user friendly. Maybe it has too many steps or maybe it takes too long or maybe it’s confusing. The best way to avoid this is to — well, there are many things you can do — put yourself in the shoes of the consumer of the product. Don’t just build things so they work technically. Build things so that they work functionally. Nobody wants to make a manual task harder to do, so developing with the consumer in mind can help anticipate the comments, questions and concerns that they will have, which can ultimately reduce the likeliness of them using this product (adoption). If you account for most or at least some of these things, you’re setting yourself up for a more successful product launch and overall adoption. No, you’re not expected to foresee every single issue possible, but people want to feel heard and seen. You can reduce a lot of back and forth by putting yourself in their shoes and understanding where they are coming from.

For me, getting drunk that night seemed like the most responsible time to get drunk in college. I had no responsibilities the following day but I did not account for the worst case scenario that ended up happening. If I was a “regular” student not traveling for a silly sport, I would have been pissed if I was trying to study for a final exam. I didn’t even calculate what could happen if we got caught because we had never been caught and honestly, we drank like our life depended on it that year. I never in a million years did I think we’d ever get caught, much less that night. We really got off so easy considering what the real punishment should have been. I thought it was the most responsible night for me to drink and that’s what I told myself for years. Clearly, we were very selfish that night and it could have been much worse.

In the end, it taught me a very valuable skill. If someone is depending on you for something, particularly something you committed to do, you better show up. Additionally, when making decisions, it’s important to understand the possible outcomes. Is the risk really worth the reward? Is there even a reward? Am I being selfish at the expense of someone else?

Some of you may say you have to be a little selfish at work and I don’t totally disagree with you. You have to selfish with your time and emotions and boundaries but when you are part of a team, there really is no I in team. Think about how your actions are going to impact the team and if there is a risk or a negative outcome, what can you do to minimize that? This will take you a long way. At the end of the day, we’re all trying to do our fucking job and get our pay check, but would it kill you to make it enjoyable and be respectful of others? That cost $0 to do, and I think we all can be a little bit more considerate when it comes to our work.

To the coaches, teachers, role models, etc. that are reading this, please know that your work matters. People look up to you and are definitely listening. You are in a position to leave a lasting impact on your players, students, mentees, kids, etc. I hope everyone is as lucky as I was to have someone like Coach Barton in their corner.