In the summer of 2014, I was working at the Internet company BuzzFeed, often characterized as a factory of lists, quizzes, and cat videos, which is not an entirely unfair portrait of what working at BuzzFeed was really like. It was a quintessentially millennial workspace, with all the clichés you can possibly imagine: a snack closet stocked with gluten-free candies and granola bars, a row of refrigerators full of seltzer water and beer, iced coffee on tap, visits from Internet-famous cats and one particularly adorable mini-horse named Mystic, and rows upon rows of young, talented, creative people.

My job, for better or worse, was to make stuff people would find funny and share with their friends. I wrote hundreds of lists and quizzes, and even curated my fair share of cat videos. At one point, I was officially listed as a senior editor on the Animals masthead, an accomplishment my journalism professors surely found worthwhile. About two years into my job there, I asked my boss if I could get drunk at lunch and review a One Direction album—trust me, I’ve had worse ideas—and she said yes. The drunk-at-work barrier officially broken, it was only a matter of time before I proposed getting drunk in the middle of the day and capturing the whole thing on camera.

Now, you might be wondering how someone who hated public speaking to the point of turning into a living beet-human would find himself in front of the camera, and the truth is, like all terrible things in life, because of karaoke. I’d never been a fan of karaoke. I found it terribly unpleasant. My first week at BuzzFeed—and my first ever week in New York City—there was a party to celebrate the launch of some new section of the website, and we all went to a karaoke bar near the office. I’d been to karaoke before, but always as an unwitting bystander, mumbling the words along with everybody else at an undetectable volume.