A quick guide to handling a St. Patrick’s Day worst-case scenario

By Jenny An March 16, 2013

A lot can go wrong on St. Patrick’s Day. The holiday named after the man credited with banishing all the snakes from Ireland, now is yet another excuse to dress up and drink.

Here’s your go-to app guide for the choose-your-own-adventure that can be St. Patrick’s Day … or, really, just any day when it’s socially acceptable to drink before noon.

You’re not sure if you’re drunk

So you had four drinks, but it was over three hours so it’s okay, right? A litany of apps purport to estimate your blood alcohol content in a variety of ways. The most common like DrinkTracker count how many you’ve had over how long (it also allows you to share this information easily on Twitter which sounds like a bad idea in the making). Or give BreathalEyes a try. The app – you guessed it – scans your eyes for signs of drunkenness.

You can’t calculater a tip

Splitting a bill is already hard enough when you’re sober. Now on St. Patrick’s Day, well, it can become a Quiz Bowl round for your math skills. Help yourself out by getting a tip calculator app. With versions that adjust based on the country like GlobeTipping and easy bill splitting functions on iTip, all you really have to do is enter a few numbers. Hopefully you’re up to that simple task.

You need to go home (and aren’t sure where you are)

You’ve strayed from the pack and now find yourself in a field. You called your friends and they need an address to find you, what to do now? Where Am I At? is a free (for a limited time) app that tells you the coordinates as well as approximates your address on the iPhone while Where Am I? Geocode does the same for Android. If you’re in one of the more than 20 cities Uber services you could even open up the app and request a cab home or to your next destination.

You’re about to drunk dial, text, tweet, Facebook … the list goes on

While DrinkTracker’s “tweet your BAC” functionality could be the beginning of some unfortunate public utterances, make sure it’s your last. The “don’t call your ex” genre of phone app is so ubiquitous it even got a Girls mention. And you’ve got some options, including Don’t Dial!, Drunk Text Savior, and Android’s DrunkBlocker. However, none of them are exactly foolproof – where there’s a will, there’s a way, right? For when everything fails, there’s always Last Night Never Happened which allows you to easily clean up Twitter or Facebook the morning after.

You got hurt

Walking can become a Herculean task with enough beers. In case that pebble turned into a boulder and you think you sprained your ankle, iTriage will walk you through your symptoms and even find the nearest hospitals and specialists.

You got arrested

Doh! You got arrested. Dear reader, I hope this doesn’t happen to you, but if it does, you’ll be prepared. The I’m Getting Arrested app is a pretty self explanatory and useful tool to get in touch with the people who will hopefully be bailing you out (as well as to help them figure out where you are).