Cultural Norm

Blog One 

When it comes to society, what does it mean to be normal? What may be normal to one person could be unusual to another. For this blog, we were told to break a social norm. My first thought was that it would be simple to think of something to do. When I began to ponder about what I would do, I realized it was harder than I thought. After some thought, I finally settled on the idea of walking through a drive-thru restaurant. I went with a group of three other girls from the class to Dairy Queen. When we got there, we walked through the line. We stood there waiting for them to take our order, but I assume we were not sensed. As we were standing there, a man in a car across the street rolled his window down and said, “Are you driving an invisible car?” Laughing it off, we decided to try to speak in to the speaker, but received no answer. We contemplated what to do, but we decided to walk around to the window. As we approached, a younger lady opened the window in a state of confusion. As we proceeded to ask her if we could place our order, an older woman walked over. She asked us if we could come inside to place our order. So, we did as she asked. When we walked inside, the younger lady came to the register to take our order. We told her what our intentions were with trying to order through the drive-thru. She laughed and told us she was going to go along with it. Thinking back to the whole situation, one of the ways we see a cultural difference is in age. While the older lady was more serious about the matter, the younger lady found it to be humorous. Although she was confused at first at what we were doing, she had a better attitude about the whole situation. I know for a fact workers do not see that happen everyday. This relates to what we discussed in class, because age, or anything else, and how we were raised influences our views of what is normal. The main thing we talked about that this relates to is the question on who decides what is normal.