Deon Cole Shares His Perfect Minibar Life Hack With Conan O’Brien

Before actor Deon Cole became known for playing Charlie Telphy in both Black-ish and its spin-off Grown-ish, as well as DJ Tanner in Angie Tribeca, he was a longtime writer for Conan O’Brien. As he explained to Conan O’Brien on this week’s Conan Needs a Friend podcast, Conan hired Cole after he’d done a stand-up set on the show, and Cole almost didn’t take the job because he didn’t like waking up that early. After some brief growing pains, however, Cole became a huge on-camera hit for Conan’s old show.

In fact, Deon Cole was such a hit that when NBC pulled Conan off The Tonight Show and Conan decided to go on tour before accepting a job with TBS, he brought Cole along with him. It was during that tour when Deon Cole came up with a terrific minibar life hack for those among us who drink too much, come back to a hotel and hit the minibar too heavily, and wake up the next morning and realize we don’t have the money to pay for all the minibar charges.

Enter Deon Cole. “We kicked it so hard after one of the shows that we closed a bar down.” Cole told Conan. “We left the bar, went to my room, opened up the minibar, and drank everything in the minibar. I woke up that morning and was like, ‘Yo. We drank this stuff.’ I looked at the bill on it, and the bill was, like, insane. I was like, ‘Yo, I cannot pay that.'”

So what did Cole do? “So, I was thinking: What’s the difference between this liquor, and the regular liquor in stores? So, I got up and I went to a whole bunch of liquor stores and I bought a whole bunch of the little mini bottles. I went store to store to find the matching mini bottles [until I recreated] everyone last one of those, including the M&Ms. I replaced all that sh*t.”

“That’s insane,” Conan told Cole. “That’s a criminal mastermind at work. It’s a genius move.”

It really, really is, and I don’t know why more people have not thought to pull off this perfect life hack. Why pay $28 for a pack of M&Ms you pulled out of the minibar at a weak moment when you can replace them for $.75 at the 7/11 down the street?

Source: Conan Needs a Friend

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