recently, i decided that i deserve a latte.
i almost never buy them anymore. in fact, i almost never buy coffee from any coffee brewing establishment anymore. this is because i bring my own freshly ground coffee to work and brew a small bodumful on a daily basis. at times i wonder whether it would be ok to bring other accessories such as a grinder, but i already spend more time on the task of coffee making than most and would be sure to inspire unpleasant feelings and possibly words from the director if i were to actually grind the beans on site. so i don’t. and on weekends, i love nothing more than to wake up and enjoy coffee! in my own home.
please note that coffee! now includes an exclamation point. coffee: a beverage that bends language to its ever changing needs.
please note, also, that i drink coffee in my own home in the morning prior to work. then i go to work and make more coffee but often don’t have the opportunity to drink it until later in the day. the only time i might buy a cup of coffee from someone is during the week when i attend therapy but, as previously noted, i have revisited my choice of subway train which means i no longer pass oren’s. so.
for a special moment in time, i decided to want a latte. it was given to me by my love. the latte was had from starbucks, but there were words. you see, the barista saw fit to correct my beloved in her use of coffee-related terminology. i instructed my darling to request, on my behalf, a double short half caf latte. instead, she asked for a double short half decaf latte. the barista took her to task.
the following is an approximate re-enactment
the barista said, “you mean half caf.”
my love said, “no, i mean half decaf.”
and so on.
my love was informed that what she really wanted was a double short half caf. while the barista may have been correct technically, he was incorrect in the universe of customer service. i doubt that “correcting customer coffee beverage terminology” was part of barista training camp.
in order to obtain understanding, i encouraged my darling to explore this further. i found that she had been thinking incorrectly about coffee and caffeine. she had been using the words interchangeably. they are not interchangeable. she feels that in respect to caffeination, the default, her request for the beverage to be made of half decaf was correct. i explained that using her own logic where caffeination is the default and the standard, that indicating something should have only half as much of the standard would be half-standard. half-caf. because she is not distinguishing caffeine from coffee, to ask for something that has half caffeinated coffee and half decaffeinated coffee requires specifying that it should be half decaffeinated but it’s still coffee – all of it. it’s like this: she is thinking: “regular coffee” is “caffeine” so if she wants to indicate that she does not want the regular thing, she has to define the beverage by what is IN it, not by what is NOT in it. half decaf, not half caf. what is in it is coffee. half of it is caffeinated. that means that the other half has to be decaffeinated.
meanwhile, anybody who has been around new york for a while knows that “regular” coffee used to mean, and in some parts of the city still means, that you want coffee that has milk and sugar in it. this is why people ask for “black” coffee because the assumption is that it should come with milk.
Filed under: annoying, barista, bodum, coffee, decaf, decaffeinated beverage, enjoyment, morning, regular, starbucks, coffee
