This happened a few days ago. I want to a college party from around 12pm to 4pm and had several shots. I was pretty impaired at the time and walked back to a friend’s dorm. Took a nap for several hours, ate, and got ready to leave around 11pm. I genuinely felt almost completely fine once I woke up. No balance issues, slurred speech, etc. Just a minor headache, I’m around 180lbs.

The plan was to walk with a friend back to their dorm which wasn’t a long walk. On the way, my friend mentioned to me that the parking lot I was in issues $89 tickets past midnight and is strict with it. I do not attend this university so I was unaware of this. My only option was to move the car to a different parking lot that doesn’t ticket overnight to avoid a crazy fine. I didn’t really question my ability to move the car given that I felt normal and hadn’t drank anything for 7-8 hours. While I would never consider getting on the main road or in a situation that could put someone else at risk, simply moving the car did not seem to be an issue to me.

The drive was ~30 seconds and I didn’t go over 20mph moving to the other lot. Nobody else was around, no stop signs ran, turn signals used, etc. I felt completely fine driving and nothing happened whatsoever. Friend and I walked back to the dorm and the entire night was fine.

The issue came in the morning when another friend mentioned they were watching us walk home from their window and saw us get into my car. I told them we were only moving it to the other lot and I hadn’t drank since 4pm like the rest of them had. Despite explaining the situation word spread to the entire friend group and I started getting texts calling me a terrible person, reckless, accusing me of dui, and had people comparing me to situations of people being killed by drunk drivers.

Am I actually a terrible person for this? I would like to preface that this was a one time situation to avoid a fine. I have no history of this and definitely don’t plan to do this in the future. Had I needed to go on a main road or felt any signs of being impaired I wouldn’t have moved my car.