Monday, October 09, 2006
STARBUCK’S STORIES—A Single Shot Frappacino Fired
I spotted a big burly guy come into Starbucks with a trucker size, stainless steel thermos. The boy was ready to spend some serious coffee dough I thought.
I went back to deep intense thought about how to reflect simulated achievement with a compelling Powerpoint project status report. And then it happened.
POW! And I mean POW!!. Coming from the barrista zone. This was not a pop but a gunshot sounding POW. I looked over at the counter and saw no one with blood gushing out of a new exit wound. It didn’t help that I had seen Scorsese’s The Departed this weekend. The only thing out of the ordinary, other than the surprised looks on everyone’s faces, was one of the boy barristas holding his hand over an ear.
The big burly “Larry the Cable like“guy asked what the hell was that. It seemed like when the barrista was able to get the lid of this guy’s thermos unscrewed, an explosion of some sort occurred. With no dead or dying bodies blown apart in the store, the manager took control and started filling out an incident form, which calmed us all down. The manager asked what the guy had in the thermos, he replied “Nothing, I just bought it on sale at Wal-Mart. It was marked down from $20 to $10. Maybe they knew these were a bad batch of thermoses.”
The guy apologized again and again, and as the form was being completed he went around and talked about the incident.
“Maybe I should sue them at Wal-Mart. Or maybe Starbucks should sue if the kid has permanent ear damage.”
“Wait. I just remembered. I bought it at Target.”
“I just left the thermos in the car for two days. Maybe it got too hot in the car.”
“Maybe I screwed the lid on too tight. I thought I could bring it into Starbucks and have them run hot water on the lid to loosen it up. I couldn’t get it open. Maybe I screwed it on too tight.”
He hit most of the customers with a comment.
When he got to me, I just had to ask, “Are you sure there was nothing in the thermos?”
He said, “Well, maybe just a little bit of frappacino that I couldn’t finish a couple of days ago. Yeah, I put in some frozen frappacino. You know the slushy kind?”
I suggested to him that frappacino probably had milk in it that could have created some pressure. He responded with a “But I screwed the lid on real tight.”
The he left with his little stainless steel story, but not before returning to the barrista and asking him to top off his drink.
