Thursday, January 23, 2014

Breaking a Cultural Norm

Breaking a Cultural Norm


Dr. Faden told us we had to break a cultural norm, and initially I had a hard time trying to come up with something to do. I talked with the people at my table and a few of us came up with walking thru a drive through at a fast food restaurant instead of driving. After basketball practice on Wednesday, January 22, three fellow classmates of mine and myself went over to Dairy Queen. We parked our car in a parking spot and noticed that not many people were there and the open sign wasn’t lit up. We checked to see if they were open and then walked over to the beginning of the drive thru. We lined up as if we were in a car with a driver, passenger, and two passengers in the back. There was a guy in a car across the street who rolled down his window and said “are y’all in an invisible car?” We proceeded to stand in front of where you would normally order in a drive thru, but there was no response from the employees working at Dairy Queen. Our plan was to have the person who was pretending to be in the driver’s seat, to order for us all as if we were in a car. We decided to walk up to the window. We knocked on the window and about four employees were staring at us with weird looks. We told them we tried to order at the ordering spot in the drive thru but we had no response. We asked to order at the window and they all seemed to go along with it initially. I attempted to order mozzarella cheese sticks and they said they didn’t have any, so then I ordered a small order of fries. Finally they asked us if we could just come inside and order, which we agreed to. When we got inside we finally told them we were walking thru the drive through for a class. They laughed it off and said they were planning on just going along with it. Honestly if I had been working at Dairy Queen and young college students came walking thru the drive through, I would probably get real annoyed because I think they are just trying to mess around and cause trouble.

2 comments:

  1. Molly,
    Your post was great! I like how you included how you would have felt if you had been in the workers situation. I honestly probably would have been annoyed too. Since I was one of the four people who walked through the drive-thru, I can support the way you described their reactions when they say us walk up to the window.

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  2. Molly,
    I enjoyed reading this and I know what it was like when you did that. Back in high school for a class project, we had a list of things we had to do with a couch and take a video of us doing it. For us we had to take a rolling couch and go through the drive thru at Dairy Queen. First off it was a pain loading and unloading a couch but it took us for ever to get them to take our order. I know they thought we were crazy, but they did get a good laugh out of it.

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