Water

Here in New York City, unlike in hicksvilles where losers live, when you go to a nice restaurant, they ask you what kind of water you want. The correct answers are either "still" (which turns into a $7-or-so bottle of mineral water) or "sparkling" (which turns into a $7-or-so bottle of carbonated water). Of course, if you happen to be a cheap loser, you can also go for "tap" if you can suffer the embarrassment of letting those words leave your lips and suffer everyone else in the restaurant giving you looks askance.

Anyway, this is all fine except for one problem. Y luuuves sparkling water, and I hate it. So unlike everyone else in the world, we can't just order a bottle of water for the table. We have to first order Y's San Pelligegrino or whatever, and then say that I, on the other hand, want tap water please.

Normally after a few minutes the rest of the people in the restaurant have stopped staring at us and we go back to normal: I'm sitting there with my glass of, you know, yucky municipal water and Y has some kind of wine-glass thingy with a lime or lemon on the side and a big bottle of sparkling water. Except sometimes they give Y and me both identical looking glasses, and now the trouble begins: because we are sophisticates here in New York, we cannot be bothered to fill our own glasses of water, so the waitfolks come by and will fill up our water glasses as needed from the bottle sitting right there on the table prominently advertising our proper upbringing. But the problem is, random waitstaff don't know that I am drinking non-fancy water, and they can't tell because the glasses are the same, and so as often as not I get stuck with the worst of both worlds: expensive yucky sparkling water which I can't drink!