The Ultimate Social Dilemma

Mission impossible: how much is a Diet Coke?

Mar 07, 2024

After a few months of working from home, cabin fever is setting in.

I need to get out!

Introducing WFP

As you’ll know from my recent failed attempt at co-working here, hauling my arse into London for such an activity is becoming less appealing.

Luckily a friend of mine is in the same situation, so we’ve decided to test out the local venues to see which ones are best for a spot of WFP (working from pubs)… all the benefits of a WeWork without the monthly membership fee! 😃

British Pubs are relentlessly quiet during the weekday afternoons, particularly in the winter, and so are very happy to welcome in any customers, even if it doesn’t include a 3-course lunch, or indeed any lunch at all.

Early findings have proved fruitful, turns out it’s very easy to tuck yourselves into a beautifully cosy table, login to the wifi and slowly sip a couple of drinks all afternoon.

Taking up space in a busy café whilst nursing a Diet Coke for an hour can be awkward, but if you’re in a quiet pub and not taking up space that other people would otherwise be using, there’s no guilt!

We’ve been sampling different venues, and after the third…

“I can feel a comparison spreadsheet coming on!”, I jokingly suggested.
“Great idea!”, came the response.

It was then agreed that we would go to a different place each time, until we had a comprehensive knowledge of the best places to hangout with our laptops in our local area.

The judging criteria

We would mark them on the following:

Table availability, Wifi, Ambience, Comfort, Toilets, Parking and… cost of a Diet Coke.

We thought the cost of a Diet Coke (bottle if available, draft if not) would be a great leveller to include on the spreadsheet.

I was going to add Service, but then the service has been exemplary everywhere, as they are so quiet in these times.

If anything we’d like it to be a bit on the leisurely side, so we don’t feel too bad for hanging out at their lovely establishment all afternoon… for the cost of two Diet Cokes, a Soy Latté and a pint of Shandy.

Obviously in my head this is already morphing into some kind of co-working Michelin Guide, perhaps we could award them stars if standards were particularly high and they didn’t make you feel bad for not having lunch there.

I’m wondering if it would be worth changing my name to Lynn and building up a reputation for being very cutting about the wifi speed and ambience of these places, purely so I could launch a Bitchy-Lynn Guide – the ultimate co-workers handbook. What do you reckon?

Off on a tangent

All this scoring does fondly remind me of grahamspotatoes #ratemytates, which was a phase our family went through back in 2017…

Allow me to explain…

Mr.D prides himself on the quality of his roast potatoes and we thought it would be fun to set-up an Instagram account for them and rate them each week.

We loved telling Sunday lunch guests about it, as if it were the most normal thing in the world, and enjoyed mocking their surprise at realising the account had amassed 100 or so followers (how, how, how?!), as we launched into the post-lunch scoring.

“Why wouldn’t they have that many followers?” I would exclaim in mock seriousness, eyebrows fully furrowed “they are exceptional.”

The rules clearly stated that a ‘Guest’ would only be able to vote if they had sampled said potatoes at least twice before. Otherwise we reasoned, they’d just give them a 10 based on their comparison to every other roast potatoes they had ever tried, and totally undermine the very strict scoring system.

I recall our son was absolutely insistent that the first batch of potatoes ever to be marked, had to by default be given a 5 out of 10, so that all future batches could be compared to it, rather than to roast potatoes in general.

Another rule, was that, no matter how amazing they were, a 10 could never be given.

This was the kind of high level chit chat that accompanied our Sunday lunches in the brief moments when Mr.D wasn’t grilling guests on their stance on the moon landings1.

Before our scores were submitted and averaged, I would always start campaigning for the introduction of at least one decimal place into the scoring system, but to no avail, this brilliant suggestion was never voted in.

Which was (and still is!) utterly ridiculous, in my humble opinion, as yet another 7 or 8 was lodged.

Despite that, I would always submit my score with two decimal places, just to be obtuse, typically a 7.49 or 8.61 to really put them through their ‘rounding’ paces.

In our family, we loved to give the most ludicrous of things, the utmost faux-seriousness, pomp and ceremony. The weekly scoring of the roast potatoes was no exception. Happy days.

Back to the co-working guide

My intention is to populate the master spreadsheet with the particulars from the first three venues, however, I realised… with abject horror…

… the absolute impossibility of finding out how much the previous Diet Coke’s were without having to re-visit each one and buy another!

I simply couldn’t just pop in and ask, then leave, without being branded a skinflint surely!?

Perhaps this over analysis was a result of my recent binge-listening to the brilliant Adrift2 podcast, hosted by

Annabel Port

Geoff’s Substack

which features such excruciating social dilemmas like this, and is highly recommended!

The social dilemma

My over-thinker’s brain immediately conjured these scenarios, each one more cringeworthy than the last:

Scenario 1: ask at the bar how much, thank them and leave the pub… hoping they don’t think I can’t afford a Diet Coke, which obviously they will.
Scenario 2: ask at the bar how much, while going into great unnecessary detail about the co-working experiment spreadsheet, and also hoping they don’t ask for my feedback on Diet Coke pricing at their competitors. As this is the first one, I have no data, so they would have no choice but to think I am lying, and therefore can’t afford a Diet Coke, when I leave without actually buying one.
Scenario 3: ask at the bar how much, then pretend to have a sudden realisation that I’m meant to be somewhere else. Complete with faux slap of head, eyes to the heavens, and “Silly me!” exclamation… before leaving the pub and hoping they believed it, rather than think I can’t afford a Diet Coke, which obviously they will.

At this point, the dual hilarity and gravity of this situation is really hitting home with me, to the point where I’m now mentally cross-examining the barman’s point of view at every stage…

If he said £3.00, and I leave, would he then be thinking, if he’d said £2.70 the transaction would have completed? How much of a discount would have been sufficient to seal the deal? He would surely be wondering.

Without fail, any kind of interaction like this would also render it a ‘story’ in the conversationally barren wasteland that is a British pub mid-afternoon on a weekday.

The barman is therefore 100% going to mention this interaction to ALL his colleagues over the course of the shift, describing me in great detail each time.

“You know that woman who was just in?”
“Weirdly, she just asked me how much a Diet Coke was and then left!!!”
“Who asks the price of a Diet Coke? Nutter!”
“I know!!! She must be insane or totally broke, and yet not broke enough to just buy a can of Diet Coke from a shop if she was that thirsty. She clearly wasn’t meeting anyone here either, otherwise why would she have left?”
“This is the most bizarre behaviour I’ve ever encountered in all my years as a barman!”

So obviously there is simply no way that anyone can ever go into a pub, ask the price of a Diet Coke and leave, without buying one.

And those of you paying close attention, will also have ascertained that (these three establishments were also local to myself, a huge criteria of any convenient co-working space.

Therefore I very much run the risk of local humiliation with this non-purchase! I might be outed in the surrounding villages as ‘the girl [who am I kidding] the woman who asked the price of a Diet Coke and left’.

My imaginary reputation would be in tatters!

Obviously I couldn’t simply phone up the pub and ask them either, as I wouldn’t believe the answer!

Surely they’d just say “£1.80” to get me off the phone and entice me in, to gorge myself on the reasonably priced nectar!

Which is why I’m sitting here, writing this, in that lovely quiet pub, on a weekday afternoon with a Diet Coke (bottle not draft) by my side.

£3.30 if you must know.

You’re welcome.

K8x

Join in the comments below:

How many decimal places would you have expected to see in the ‘Rate My Tates’ system?
What’s the cost of a Diet Coke (bottle or draft) in your local pub, and more importantly, how did you find that out?
Have you ever tried co-working with fellow working-from-home friends? 🤓

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