Columnist examines an innovative and popular drive-through prank
Mattie Stevens, ’13
Imagine: It’s your first day on the job at the local drive-thru, and your only hope is that you’ll make it through the shift without mishaps or getting yelled at by your coworkers. A car of high school girls pulls up and you offer them their vanilla and chocolate swirl ice cream cones. The driver extends her hands to grab the treats—but then at the last minute, she flips her hands to take the cones by the ice cream side.
How are you supposed to react in this scenario? Should you chuckle and go along with it, stand there awkwardly or should you fight back? As they drive away laughing you stand there, stunned as you realize that you have just become a victim of coning.
Most high school students spend their lazy summer days in the midst of monotony, lounging by the pool or playing video games to pass the time. Once that routine becomes blasé, students hunt for new ways to entertain themselves. The treasure in this summer’s hunt was coning.
Coning is the act of ordering an ice cream cone in a drive-thru. The twist is, you grab the treat by the ice cream, not the cone.
What’s the point of coning? By watching a myriad of videos from Youtube, it seems the reactions of the “victims” were amusing. This may be a reason for people to partake in the messy, yet entertaining activity.
To most adolescents, a coning escapade is simply a way to pass a lazy day of summer. But to fast food employees, coning can be insulting.
Corey Lewis, an employee of McDonald’s, is left confused after a coning experience.
“Some kids ordered a cone of ice cream, and everyone was screaming, ‘No don’t give it to them! They’re going to cone!’ So I told them, ‘You better not be coning,’ but of course they did,” Lewis said. “I just don’t understand what would compel a person to do such a horrendous act like that. I didn’t do anything to them. Were they unsatisfied with the product or something? I just don’t understand what it’s all about.”
Another employee at McDonald’s, Fatimah Fall, feels similarly but chooses to voice these feelings differently.
“[Expletive], I throw it back at the [expletive] [expletive] everytime! Everytime I do it,” Fall said.
Why these employees get so agitated is something coners question, while those employees then question coners. Employees generally feel belittled and taken advantage of. They claim that, as long as they are satisfied, the customers will disregard how the employers feel.
Meanwhile, the coners are confused as to why fast food employees are so taken aback by this action. They aren’t being insulted or harmed. People are simply trying to change things up a bit.
Why should they conform to society and grab their ice cream cones by the cone? The absurdity! Why not try something new and grab the ice cream cone by the ice cream? YOU try spending your entire summer at the pool while trying not to get skin cancer or become a TV zombie. Being a teenager during the summer is so draining.
