While none of us ever really know what kind of day we’re about to have, that seems to go double for those who work jobs that put them in front of a lot of customers.
Because while workers may be able to predict that at least a few of them will be unpleasant in a given day, even the most jaded fast food employee will likely be blindsided when a customer pulls up to order $700 worth of food. This is also a major problem for baristas and that’s particularly true at Starbucks where overly complicated drinks are increasingly becoming the norm.
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However, it’s also possible for the understandable frustration against these types of customers to fester so much that it leaves innocent patrons with important reasons for their specific orders left in the crossfire.
And that tendency has inspired one person to write an impassioned plea that resonated with so many others across the internet.
In a Tumblr post that has since been uploaded to Reddit, a user named ProgramaticallyDelicious asked food service workers to consider why customers order what they do.
As they wrote , “Maybe he’s ordering decaf because he has a heart condition, and you’re about to give him a heart attack and send him to the hospital.”
They introduced a similar possibility that a woman choosing a sugar-free option could be a diabetic and ignoring this request could dangerously elevate her blood sugar levels.
Of course, the customer could also simply want a decaf coffee or sugar-free option for their own sakes.
This person then applied their message to dairy-free and gluten-free requests as well, saying that they could be doing so to avoid serious digstive problems.
And in their words, “Maybe they’re allergic and you’re about to sponsor an all black event in an open field.”
Since it can often take hours for those with certain sensitivities to show symptoms, those who switch out the requested options for those including dairy or whatever else a customer is trying to avoid wouldn’t immediately be able to tell whether they’re “faking” their condition.
But even if we put these considerations aside, the ultimate point that ProgramaticallyDelicious was trying to make was that it shouldn’t matter to an employee whether a customer “needs” the ingredients they request or not.
Because if you just fill their order as requested and they didn’t actually have any dietary restrictions, then they eat or drink it the same way everyone else does before heading on their way.
It only matters when a worker decides to secretly change the customer’s order anyway and they end up experiencing an emergency as a result.
As ProgramaticallyDelicious put it, “Are you willing to bet their life on it?”
An early response to this plea wondered if they were actually addressing something that fast food and coffee shop workers are even known to do.
And although one commenter could only speak to their own experiences, they maintained that every coffee shop they worked at had at least one employee who made a habit of changing orders without the customer’s knowledge.
As they described, common excuses for doing this tended to range from, “she doesn’t need to be dieting,” to “non-dairy milk is so hard to steam and drinking soy is a fad” to “I don’t want to go get another bag of gluten-free.”
So as this commenter put it, “At least once, I caught it maybe 3 seconds from disaster.”
Although they wrote “allergy — no dairy” on a customer’s cup, one of the baristas apparently thought the allergy was fake and that she was just trying to waive the fee for dairy-free milk.
With that, the commenter stopped the customer from drinking most of it, but she had licked up enough drops to need both her Epi-Pen and a hospital visit.
The barista who changed the order was fired on the spot, but this person warned that there are many more like her out there.
h/t: Reddit | puppykat00
