Opossum Beer Shirt Pays For The Beer

A rumpled dress shirt and a loosely knotted tie do not usually show up on office wall art, but here they wrap around an opossum gripping a beer bottle like it owes him money.

The Opossum Beer Shirt Design

The Opossum Beer Shirt Pays For The Beer design puts the animal front and center, tie askew, ID badge dangling, both paws wrapped around a green bottle labeled simply “BEER,” while the phrase “I hate my job but it pays for the beer, and I need beer, because I hate my job” stacks down the left side in bold, uneven type. The opossum’s droopy eyes and tired posture do more of the talking than the text does. Nothing about the layout is centered or symmetrical, which keeps the eye moving between the slogan and the artwork instead of settling on one spot.

Cubicle humor has been done on shirts for years, usually with a coffee mug or a stick figure slumped over a desk. This one swaps that out for a marsupial who looks like he has sat through one too many Monday meetings, which is a smaller, stranger corner of workplace-complaint apparel. It reads less like a slogan tee and more like a cartoon panel that happens to be wearable.

Who Wears This Kind Of Novelty Tee

People who dread their 9-to-5 but still show up tend to gravitate toward this sort of funny office job shirt, especially ones who like their sarcasm delivered through animals instead of stick figures. It works for a Friday afternoon at the desk, a happy hour after a long shift, or a weekend spent doing anything but thinking about work emails. Some fans of graphic tees just like opossums. That’s reason enough too.

We started Teebete as a small print-on-demand shop, and pieces like this one are why we keep going, the tired-eyed opossum with his beer bottle gets more comments at a barbecue than most licensed sports gear does. It sits in that novelty category between drinking shirts and animal-lover shirts, without trying too hard to be either one.

Pair the shirt with the same complaints everyone already has about Mondays, and let the opossum say it instead.