Drinking is bad. When you drink, you can accidentally hang up your phone handset askew so the battery runs out instead of recharging, and also toggle the ringer off on the base of the phone, and then you miss it when UnwiredBen calls you from a conference* in MUNICH, GERMANY. Which sucks, especially if you’ve never gotten a transatlantic phone call in your entire life. A transatlantic voice mail message just isn’t as good.
*Probably not from the conference itself, since it was 5am in Munich. Probably from his hotel room. Unless Palm developers are way rowdier than I thought.
I heard stories today of developers that were out drinking and talkning until 4AM, so your estimate of rowdiness may be a little low. I’ve also heard of people who has much, much too much to drink at last years conference and now live under fear of being blackmailed by co-workers.