Personalatte

As I finish another shift in the store, I ponder on the gigantic differences in how some customers deal with similiar situations.Why is it that more often than not customers seem to feel like everything that ever goes wrong with their order, is a personal vendetta against themselves?

Parr Exam Pluh.

There is a problem on the till. Whatever it is, something has gone wrong. Any problem on a till I have ever seen has either been resolved within two minutes, or someone else uses their till- so it is really no big deal. Obviously the customer never considers that their overall wait time will be no different, as their drink is already in the queue and will be with them in roughly 2-3 minutes time. 9/10 customers roll their eyes. Half of them will vocalise a tut. of that half, a quarter will say something completely unhelpful that could only slow down the process by taking the attention away from trying to solve the problem. eg. "can't you just..."

I wish that it would be appropriate to say "Obviously, I could just... but, that would be far too easy wouldn't it? Clearly I enjoy the thrill of a challenge, and need complex problem solving thrown at me at every turn just to keep myself stimulated constantly. Call me a thrill seeker, but I live for the chance to do something long-winded just so I can slow down your day ever so slightly."

Wouldn't that be awesome?

Cappuccino

So they never teach you how to actually spell Cappuccino. You say it at least thirty times in any one shift- but you ask your barista how to spell it and you might just catch them out. I had to google it for this post.

I don't have a structure for these posts- but I want to clear up what makes a cappuccino a cappuccino (That's 5 times I've said it- just showing off my spelling prowess really). I was, in the not too distant past, told I didn't know what a cappuccino was. This was because I hadn't put chocolate sprinkles on top of it.

Now, I will ask you, is a lack of chocolate sprinkles reason to shout at a Barista?

I politely tried to explain that a cappuccino doesn't need to have chocolate sprinkles on it, and that the sprinkles were just some fancy addition to make it look pretty. Much like a trifle is still a trifle even if it doesn't have chocolate sprinkles on top- the difference lies in the drink, not the sprinkles.

A cappuccino is milk that has been heavily aerated, free-poured onto shots of espresso (as opposed to holding back foam until the end to create a latte with just a quarter inch of foam). The result is a very light and creamy cup of coffee.

The customer was having none of it. Reminding me that he has been drinking them for longer than I have been making them- the whole time covering his drink in obscene amounts of sprinkles. So I just left him to his devices. But it made me wonder. Why did he care so much? It surely cannot be something to get so angry about, it is only coffee, in fact, it is only chocolate powder. Is it because he felt insecure that his coffee knowledge wasn't up to scratch? Did he feel threatened by my seeming intellect of the way I made his drink? Was he just "a bit of a dick"?