What I said
Posted on December 8th, 2010
This is the redacted version of an email that I sent out late this afternoon:
Oh. my. God. I decided to make a last ditch attempt to kill this headache with a massive dose of caffeine. We ended up at [ ] Cafe (I should NOT have gone local) and I think they gave my mocha (with two shots of espresso) to P. I looked at my cup after I started to feel queasy (it was all gone by then) and saw “hot chocolate” written on it – on what should have been my soy mocha (so that means they put whipped cream on a soy mocha and placed it in front of P, and handed me the (dairy) hot chocolate – on purpose?!). So I just drank something that will probably result in my throwing up and my kid got an OD of caffeine. LOVELY.
I just spent the last two hours listening to her jibber about all sorts of existentialist things (we categorized things that are alive and not alive, among other things), heard a running commentary on the taxonomy of birds, let her do “ring around the rosie” on all of the trees on the east side of [ ] Square, ran her around the Christmas tree in [ ] Square dozens of times, to the amusement of the bocce (?) playing old men (NOT RECOMMENDED WITH MIGRAINE), and walked her back and up all [ ] flights of stairs (IBID). I think she may be winding down now. She is staring off into space and giggling. The walk home was hell. I think I’m going to throw up now.
It’s 5:30. I am counting the minutes until she falls asleep.

When I was out of town, H decided that letting B drink an entire can of Mountain Dew was a good idea. I think the results were similar.
WTF is wrong with that coffee shop?!
I hope you are feeling better.
I don’t know for sure if it was on purpose – but the girl who brought the drinks out was acting kind of weird. I think they screwed up the order (and put whipped cream on the mocha instead of the hot chocolate) and were too lazy to fix it.
I took a phenergan in the nick of time and am fine, and P is wound down and close to sleep. Still – I am so NOT going there, no matter how wonderful their molasses cookies with crystalized ginger are!
Complain. Seriously. After I graduated from college I worked at a coffee shop (local) and we were trained to be very careful about orders for the reasons you describe. I was not a professional employee and often payment was diverted into the tip jar (sorry, employer; I would never do that now) but I would NEVER have messed up an order out of laziness. We pulled new shots if they didn’t look right the first time. And this was not a great coffee shop. I am sure your coffee shop must have pretensions to be better than ours and I am sure they would be mortified.
Write a letter that expresses your disappointment, but isn’t too mean or snarky. You’ll probably at least get a gift certificate out of the ordeal.