(TLDR at the bottom)

Okay SO long story y’all- buckle in.

There’s a customer, and we can call her... “Rachel”. If you’ve seen my previous posts, I’m a green bean and I’m still learning. Our first interaction went as follows:

R: “Can you make that at 190°? You’ll have to make it in batches.”

Me: um I can try? I think it really only goes up to 170°.

R: “Would you just do it?”

Me: 😒😒😬

She got a tall caramel macchiato, w no foam, 190°, nonfat. So obviously we already have a problem. Once it’s hot enough, it’s like, ALL foam???

As I pull her shots, I do her vanilla, and I have the steamer on Extra Hot, and I’m not really paying attention to it. When I hear the steamer finish, I do the wipe-y thing and the blow-y thing and pour her milk in the cup, and take the shots, that maybe sat for a couple of seconds (clearly not dead yet), and poured them in. The littlest bit of foam got on top, because I suck at my job ig, I don’t know. She got pissed and told me to do it again, because I got foam in her drink, and the shots were “OBVIOUSLY dead”- and her drink was practically cold 🙃

I get a little anxious because I have a line of 15 drinks and this interaction is taking up a lot of time. Plus she’s practically laying on my bar. My manager is next to me, helping me by prepping cups, and he hears this interaction, and he says “hey, don’t worry about it. I’ll make it. You go on to the next drink.” She leaves with his drink.

So within the last few days, she came back. My manager is at the register, I’m on bar. She sees me, and just ignores my greeting, and walks up to the register. I hear her say, “do you have someone who KNOWS how to make my drink hot enough?”

Boss man: it shouldn’t be a problem.

So I start prepping her milk to get her out and keep her from staring at me for so long. I put our steamer in manual, and I watch it hit around 180°, and it starts to boil over. I literally cannot steam it anymore because if I do, I’ll burn my hand. I’m really not a fan. I use the spoon and pour out her milk, and make sure there’s NO FOAM. Then I pull her shots. AND SHE HAS ME RE-PULL THEM AGAIN.

anyway. Boss man comes next to me and says, “awesome, I saw it hit 190°, you’re good.” So I pour her shots, and she leaves.

Today, she came back in, and I actually was on my ten so I didn’t see her, but my coworker came up to me after I was back and said, “hey just so you know, Rachel is temping our drink with her own thermometer. She just tempt mine in front of me. Ours said 185° and hers said 179°. She said if she had time she would make us remake it.” I practically screamed. After this, we put a short amount of milk in a cup, and steamed it as much as we could without it boiling over, and it only got to around 185° on our machine.

Side note: I know we could definitely make her milk in small batches. But if we do, her milk will still drop a few degrees while we make the next batch. And if she’s getting upset about 5°, I feel like there’s no way to win.

TLDR: I’ve had multiple negative interactions with this customer, and I refuse to put myself in danger of getting burned just so she has a drink. Obviously, everyone knows what they want, and have a right to having what they want. But I’m not putting myself at risk.