You just sat down in the cushioned booth — one friend next to you, two across. You got the aisle seat. The place is packed. You had been waiting for the “Your table is ready!” text for 20 minutes. The hostess told you “10-20 minutes,” but when there’s a time range for table waiting, it always takes the max.
The waiter comes up to the table with a smile on their face. You wonder if it’s a genuine smile or an artificial product of their tip-dependent trade. The waiter looks at the friend across from you and asks if they can get you guys started with something to drink.
Here’s the dilemma: You need to crank out an essay after dinner tonight, but you can already feel your eyes, body and mind drifting off into a deep sleep. You’re exhausted. How do you stay awake enough to be social with friends and finish your homework later?
Caffeine, duh. A Coke, Pepsi or whatever they have should do.
But then your friend smiles, almost apologetically, at the waiter as they fiddle with the menu in front of them. “I’ll just stick with water.”
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Oh no.
Both you and the waiter look to the next friend in the clockwise rotation. You can see their eyebrows and nose scrunching, their shoulders shrugging slightly and their face turning a subtle flamingo pink as they nod, “Just water for me as well.”
It’s happening.
You hate those phrases. “Stick” and “just” always signal an order of tap water in a translucent plastic cup with a black plastic straw and a moldy lemon wedge floating among the ice cubes.
Conformity is defined by Britannica as “the process whereby people change their beliefs, attitudes, actions, or perceptions to more closely match those held by groups to which they belong or want to belong or by groups whose approval they desire.”
Conformity, my friends, helps explain the drink order domino effect: When you can’t help but act like you want exactly what your friends want due to social and societal pressures. As the waiter holds that little booklet and pen in their hands and turns to the friend in the corner seat sitting next to you, you know fate is not on your side tonight.
In what seems to be slow-motion, the last friend to order before you stares the waiter dead in the eyes. Because your other two friends already took the infamous “just” and “stick” lines, they simply have to mutter, with Clint Eastwood-conviction, “Water.”
Water. Why’d it have to be water?
Your friends all just went the kale-smoothie-drinking, vitamin-supplement-consuming, I-get-up-at-four-in-the-morning-to-run-10-miles-every-day-and-am-the-CEO-of-a-large-corporation, healthy route to restaurant drink ordering. Of course, to quote “Seinfeld,” “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
However, you have needs! You have secret issues — essays you’ve put off for weeks! You have your own priorities and desires. But now you can’t order a Coke or Pepsi. Why?
According to the University of Melbourne, one common reason for conformity is “that failing to follow a norm may elicit negative social sanctions, and so we conform to norms in an effort to avoid these negative responses.”
How would you look if everybody else at the table ordered water, but you — oh, dear — ordered a sugary, carbonated, teeth-decaying pop (or soda)? You can’t do that! You have to be like everyone else, even though they don’t know that you might have perfectly good reasoning for doing what you do. Maybe you were just born to order Coke.
There’s a scene in the 2017 film “Call Me By Your Name” where the main character, Elio, listens to his mom read aloud from a French story. She reads about a knight deciding whether or not he should confess his love to a princess: “Is it better to speak or die?”
Panic takes control. There is no hope now. You have to hide your inner desire for a caffeinated beverage. Nobody can know that you, just moments ago, were considering ordering a Coke or something heinous like that.
You have to order water if everyone else orders water first. If that first friend, fiddling with the menu, had turned to the waiter and said, “I’ll go with the pink lemonade,” what would have happened then?
All hell could have broken loose! We could’ve seen Coke, Sprite, iced tea, beer, who knows!
But alas! In a world that is supposedly becoming more liberal, more accepting and more open to discussing our honest emotions and opinions, we still live in a world of closeted Coke-orderers and conformist water-ordering pawns. As the saying goes, “If everyone else is doing it … ”
Don’t do it. Don’t be just another one of the moldable “clay males and females.” Stick up for yourself. Look at that waiter — clicking their plastic blue-ink pen in anticipation — dead in the eyes, sit up straight, furrow your eyebrows, curl the upper corner of your lip and then order whatever you want to order. This aquatic cowardice must end.
So, next time you want to do your hair this way or that, wear those earrings or that cool sweater, ask that person to prom or formal or bance or do anything else that requires 24 fluid ounces of carbonated courage, consider the drink order domino effect and the horrifying reality that we live in a world that still sees something “wrong with that.”
And then ask yourself, “Is it better to speak or die?”
Alex is a freshman in Business.
