Legend has it, if you take too many Benadryl in one sitting, you’ll meet the “Hat Man,” a malevolent yet fashionable creature who haunts you through dismal day into an endless night. For some students at the Kellogg School of Management, however, binging on a bunch of ‘Bennies led instead to a fantastic new study buddy.

“I was really pissed off at first when I got a virus in the middle of recruitment season,” MBA student McKinsey Blackstone said. “I could hardly get through my power poses without keeling over. Turns out, though, that shady little ghost you see on Benadryl is actually really good at the consulting grind.” Blackstone also shared that prior to signing a pact with the devil and haunting the sweaty nightmares of unwell people around the globe, the Hat Man completed a six-year consulting stint at Deloitte in its human capital division.

After his first ten years in the Shadow Lands between human consciousness and the turbulent, virus-ridden hivemind underscoring the entire known universe, the Hat Man even returned to Bain for six months as an executive recruiter.

“He told me that fear, power and a little insanity can be just as valuable to the consulting world as they are to the dread realm of mind-flaying monsters,” Blackstone told Flipside reporters as sickly pink fluid leaked from his eyes and nose.

After sharing his experiences — and his blister pack of Benadryl Allergy Extra-Strength — with a few select classmates, Blackstone seemed to have definitively fallen under the sombrero-ed Satan’s sinister spell, roommate Price W. Cooper shared. Though Blackstone’s new daily routine of turning his neck 360 degrees and striking passing birds out of the sky with his mind was “unnerving” at first, Cooper said, he wound up adding a nightly handful of the pretty pink pills to his own routine after Blackstone quickly secured not one, but three summer consulting offers.

“People say going into consulting is like selling your soul to the devil,” Blackstone and Cooper said in unison, speaking from a hastily drawn pentagram on the floor of the Sherman Avenue CVS. “The Hat Man says there are faster ways to please our Master while still grabbing that six-figure signing bonus.”