Order first and nobody asks what you're drinking

Get a glass in your hand inside the first ninety seconds. Before the coats, before the hellos, before anybody from accounting spots you standing there with two empty hands like a man waiting to be helped. Walk in, go to the bar, order, then work the room.

An empty hand at a party is an open invitation. Somebody will fill it. They'll mean well, they'll be holding two flutes, and you'll be having a conversation you didn't want to have while a line forms behind them.

Soda water, three limes, rocks glass. That's it. That's the whole trick, and most of what follows is just detail.

Order what you want, not what you don't

"Nothing for me" is an opening. People hear a door and they walk through it. "Soda water with three limes, in a rocks glass" is an order, and orders end conversations.

The glass matters more than you'd think. Soda in a rocks glass with a lot of lime reads as a vodka soda from four feet away, which is the exact distance at which people form opinions about other people's drinks. Cranberry and soda in the same glass reads as something with gin in it. Ginger beer with a lime wedge looks like a mule minus the copper mug. None of this is deception. Nobody's owed an inventory of your evening.

Non-alcoholic beer has gotten genuinely good in the last few years, and Athletic Brewing and the Guinness 0.0 you see on tap at chain steakhouses both pour into a normal pint glass and look like a normal pint. If the venue has one, order it by name so you sound like a man with a preference instead of a man with a policy.

Tip the bartender up front

This is the move that makes the whole night run itself. Get to the bar early, lean in, keep your voice low, and say: "Everything I order tonight is going to be non-alcoholic. Make them look like the real thing." Then hand him a folded twenty, even at an open bar. Especially at an open bar.

Bartenders do this all night for designated drivers and for the pregnant bridesmaid in the green dress. You're not the first person to ask and you won't be the strangest request of the shift. What you've bought is a guy behind the bar who has your back for four hours and won't ask you loudly, across a crowded room, whether you wanted that with or without.

At a work dinner where a bottle of red is already going around the table, the same move works on the server. Catch her when you go to wash your hands. Thirty seconds, done.

Two answers and a subject change

Somebody will push. Almost always it's hospitality, not malice. A guy feels good, he wants you to feel good, and he's noticed you're a step behind. That's not an attack.

Give him two answers, then move.

First answer: "I'm driving tonight." Second answer, if it comes back around: "I'm good, honestly, this one's great." Then ask him something about himself that he'd enjoy answering. How the new house is coming. Whether his kid made the team. The push dissolves because he wasn't that invested in it.

What kills you is explanation. The longer your reason, the more it sounds like a debate you're hoping to have, and somebody in that room will happily oblige. You don't owe the story. Not to a regional manager, not to a college roommate, not to the uncle who's very interested in your business at 10 p.m.

If a third push comes, and it rarely does, that's a comment on his night rather than yours. Smile, let it go, walk toward the food. Winning that exchange is worth nothing.

Weddings have a dead hour, so give yourself a job

The stretch between the ceremony and the seated dinner is where people drink because they've got nothing else to do with their hands or their time. Cocktail hour runs long, the photos run longer, and you're standing on a lawn in dress shoes holding a napkin.

Take a job. Help the grandmother find her table. Round up the kids who've discovered the dessert display. Volunteer for the group photo wrangling nobody else wants to do. Find the one guest who's come alone and doesn't know a soul and bring him into your circle.

By the time dinner lands you've talked to fifteen people and the hard part of the night is already over. After the toasts, nobody is tracking what anybody's drinking. You can toast with sparkling cider, you can toast with water, you can toast with an empty hand raised. The gesture is what counts and it's always been what counts.

Work dinners are a different animal

The wine ritual is the whole thing at a client dinner. A bottle arrives, glasses go around, and the table synchronizes. So be the guy who pours. Reach over, top up the person on your right, keep the bottle moving. You're at the center of the ritual and you never had to be in it.

Then order food like you mean it. Appetizer, entree, sit down and eat. The man who orders a side salad and drinks water for two hours looks like he's serving a sentence. The man who orders the ribeye is just a man at dinner.

Stay for the second hour. That's the one everybody else forgets and you won't. Guards drop, the real project concerns come out, somebody tells you what's actually happening with the contract. You'll walk out with three things worth writing down in the car. That advantage is quiet, it compounds, and it's the reason plenty of people stay sharp at these things on purpose.

Pick your leave time before you arrive

Decide in the driveway: 9:45, or after the cake, or when the playlist turns over. Then say goodbye to three people, by name, and go. Not an Irish exit. Three real goodbyes take four minutes and they're the part people remember.

Leaving is easier if you drove, and driving is the best cover story ever invented because it's true. It also makes you the most useful man in the building at midnight, which is a fine thing to be.

Don't become the auditor

Quickest way to make your sobriety everybody's problem is to make everybody's drinking your project. No counting other people's glasses. No little comment about the third round. No look. People feel being watched before they can name it, and then you're the guy nobody sits next to.

You're at a party. Be good company.

Some nights you just don't go

If you're early in this and the event is a minefield, skip it. Send the note, say you can't make it, go home. There's no trophy for white-knuckling your cousin's open bar in month two. Bring a wife or a friend who knows, text somebody on the way in and on the way out, sit near the door. Play it however you need to play it.

And when everybody's comparing notes on Saturday morning about who said what to the VP, you'll be the one at 6:40 with coffee and a clear head and the whole day still in front of you. The party ended at the same time for everyone. You just got to keep the next morning.