I work at a coffee shop and have gotten all my co-workers to start calling lattes “hot milkybois”
I also got everyone to refer to the salted caramel blended drink as “the big salty” and I consider it one of my greatest accomplishments
Oh yeah and any time someone orders a hazelnut latte with almond milk (which specifically is a weirdly popular drink) I say “one HOT NUT latte coming right up!”
My coworkers have not latched on to this one like they did with the others for some reason.
I forgot to mention I also pronounce “hot chocolate” like “hot cocklate”… because I’m awful.
please give us updates
Our largest drink size is affectionately referred to as “Texas Size” so sometimes when I hand it out in the drive-thru I like to say, “Here’s that TEXAS SIZE [drink] for ya, YEEEEHAW!”
And some people look at me as though I have just made their entire day while others look like they they could not possibly get away from me soon enough. Both reactions are equally satisfying.
I made this into a game except when I hand out the Texas-size drinks I say “Can I get a YEEHAW?” And the guests always look mortified but occasionally one of them will let out a terrified “yeehaw” and all my coworkers cheer and then we keep a running tally of how many yeehaws we each get on the back of a pastry bag.
Tag: retail
A very muscly dude came through my line with a basket full of glitter. He has them arranged in chromatic order- red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet.
I go out on a limb.
“Pride?”
“Hell yeah. I’m gonna Mod Podge the fuck out of my old converse.” Then. “Shit, did I say fuck?” Pause. “Fuck- I said shit.”
I am containing my laughter.
“Just so you know, the mod podge you have isn’t waterproof- so if they get wet the glitter will probably come off.”
Wide-eyed pause.
“I’m hoping it rains so I leave a trail of rainbow glitter wherever I go.”
ARE computers flammable? I feel like they’re probably not?
This depends entirely on how much uncooked rice you have shoved in the floppy drive.
…Ok I feel like there’s a story behind this.
There is, yes!
After I quit school, I worked briefly as a computer repair tech. Going to people’s houses or businesses, fixing their various bugs, etc. While I would rapidly decide that field was not for me because of the one businessman who needed multiple “cup holder” replacements (you know, you push that button and that plastic holder thing with the hole comes out … I think it is technically call the “Cup Depository Tray”? CD, right?), he is not the most memorable encounter. No, that goes to one of the nicest ladies I ever encountered on this job.
She called us out because her computer had stopped turning on, and wouldn’t even make a noise when she tried to push the button. One day it had just shut off while she was using it and stubbornly refused to come back on, and could we please see what we could do to fix it?
So I go out there expecting some wire had gotten loose and there was no power getting to the machine or something. It happens sometimes if a machine gets banged around enough, or if someone fiddles with it wrong or is careless putting it together, computers are finicky like that. But as soon as I get to the box itself, I know it isn’t that simple, because of the smell. I have smelled computers with dust all up in them, that isn’t uncommon, but this is just vile and, more importantly, entirely new.
I am now more curious than afraid, so I open it up and there is a mass of goopy off-white mush spilling all over everything, parts of it are burnt to circuits, there is almost nothing untouched by the mass. But by far the worst off is the A drive. That is the obvious source of the problem, and the thing has … not “exploded”, but more burst from the pressure of whatever this stuff was.
So I ask the woman if she had used the floppy drive recently and noticed any problems, and she says no, not until the whole machine stopped working. But I come to find out what she used it for.
Turns out this woman was a devout Shinto practitioner and believed that her computer (among other things) had a soul that needed to be respected an honored. Which, fair enough. But she chose to honor it by feeding it a grain of rice every time she had to wake it up and disturb its rest. For years this kindhearted woman had been putting a grain of rice into the A drive every time she turned it on or woke the thing up from sleep mode. And eventually that was enough pressure to break the drive and start spilling out onto the internal bits, where the heat melted it all and caused no end of problems.
After that it was a simple enough thing to explain that there are better ways to honor and take care of your computer’s needs, what with virus scans or defrags and the like, but that poor device was entirely lost.
I guess the moral of the story here is that you can try your best to be good and still wind up hurting people? Maybe? Or else it’s that even the most horrible out of context problem isn’t nearly as frustrating as one middle aged jerk who won’t freaking listen when you tell him that CD trays are not for your dang coffee cups!
The end~
ok but im so taken with the fact that she was feeding her computer to apologise for waking it up?? thats so sweet????
Everyone talks about how shitty and stupid customers are, why don’t we ever talk about the cool ones?
-Bilingual children translating for their parents/grandparents like a boss
-The drunk guy you had to deny a sale to and he took it so well and maybe even thanked you for keeping him safe
-The random peeps in a long check out line who stop to tell you you’re doing an amazing job
-The regulars who have your back when someone starts giving you a hard time
-Customers who let you know to keep an eye on someone for shoplifting
-Bros who insist on cleaning up their own mess/spill
-The really upbeat/cheery mom/aunt type customer that just kind of brightens your day a bit
Feel free to add, you guys. You know who they are, let’s give them some love.
The ones who share a “yikes™” glance with you when someone is rude
The nice Aunties that let you take a moment to cry in the back after being yelled at by a man, who’s been yelling for 20+ minutes.
The little kids that smile, say please and thank you, but still have restless child energy. They hand you their folded bills and watch you smooth them out. Learning to hand money over that way next time.
The tiny Japanese grandma’s that light up when you say their names just right.
The statuesque business women who call you “sweetie” or “honey that have giant smiles and always tip.
Sometimes I think back on the time I spent working as a barista, and it seems SO STRANGE to me that “coffee shop AU” has become synonymous with narratives that are low on conflict, high on wholesome romance. During the year I spent working at a coffee shop:
- A coworker of mine took a bunch of psychedelics, walked through some strangers’ plate-glass door, and threatened them with a bowie knife, leading to his arrest and imprisonment (and, needless to say, a late opening for the coffee shop that morning).
- Another coworker, an ex-military type with a young wife and a new baby, decided to smoke up for the first time ever with two other mutual coworkers, in the back of one of their trucks; and ended up having a three-way with them which ended his marriage.
- I had a nervous breakdown, stopped being able to eat food or hold conversations, and ended up sleeping on my coworker’s couch for three weeks before she finally called my parents to come collect me.
- Multiple store managers were fired for embezzlement. (Reminder: this was within the space of a single year.)
- Yet another coworker, who was seventeen at the time, started dog-sitting for a couple of regulars in their (I’m guessing) early 50s, and ended up in an ongoing creepy and incidentally illegal ~relationship~ with them both.
- Various employees discovered, in the course of cleaning the bathrooms: couples fucking in the bathrooms; junkies passed out in the bathrooms; drunks puking in the bathrooms; both adults and children weeping in the bathrooms; a woman bleeding all over the bathroom from a gash in her throat (??); a dude standing in the middle of the bathroom floor and pissing in the opposite direction from the toilet, so that when the employee opened the unlocked door she got piss all over her (????).
- The owner of the bridal shop across the street was exposed as both abusive toward her employees and also cooking the books, which led to my coffee shop taking on a couple of untrained and weirdly conservative bridal shop workers for a few months while the bridal shop was shuttered and sold to new owners. Later the larcenous former bridal shop owner came down with some horrible disease which caused her to lose both her hands.
- There was a regular universally referred to as “Sketchy Steve,” who came in at 7am for a three-shot latte with room for Seagrams 7, and dealt drugs to all us baristas. I actually, at one point (I cannot believe I was this stupid), went inside Sketchy Steve’s house, and allowed him to spend like half an hour showing me his collection of découpaged outlet plates and also soliciting me for sex while I uncomfortably yet studiously declined.
- Right before I started, the store manager had walked off the job in the middle of a shift, and ¾ of the employees had walked out after him. None of them ever returned.
Like, working on the front lines of food service was the most operatically sordid professional experience I have ever had, and one of the most surreal; and it is hilarious to me that THAT, of all jobs, is the one that has come to stand for soft-focus domestic romance in fandom circles.
reblogging for “operatically sordid”
Ditto.
i also work as a barista and here are some anecdotes for you
– A woman was banned from the store for peeing on one of our chairs. She sneaked back into the store to pee on another chair in retaliation
– On my second day a car burst into flames in the parking lot. nobody ever claimed the car
– I wasn’t at work when this happened thankfully but at one point an unidentified woman became violently ill in our bathroom, vomiting up what the janitor described to me as “blood and chunks of flesh” before passing out on the floor
– An old man followed me around the store while I was on break and attempted to convince me to run away to Las Vegas with him
– Things we have discovered in our restroom: a large purple double dildo, porn magazines that had been viciously ripped apart, a pair of white boxer-briefs smeared with blood and feces, about 50 business cards for someone’s “freelance sorcerer” career
– One time a chipmunk got into the store, and we barricaded it into a closet and sent someone to get a live trap. The head manager at the time, who was a soulless asshole and also very stupid, then spent upwards of half an hour attempting to kill the chipmunk by smashing it with a mallet, ignoring the increasingly desperate objections of the cafe staff. Luckily the chipmunk was too fast for him and we eventually caught it in the live trap to be freed at a local nature park
– On Craigslist Missed Connections i discovered an anonymous man posting incessantly about another customer’s pantyhose. The contents of his posts made it clear that he was a regular, and also that he was jerking off in the cafe somewhere. We never caught him.
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sparksoffandommagic 