A barista has been called ‘nasty’ by her friends after telling them about the prank she plays on customers at her job in a cafe.
Posting to the “r/AmITheA–hole” (AITA) subReddit, she described how the prank happened.
In her post, the high school student explained how often she dealt with hostile and angry customers who all seemed to be in a bad mood.
She says she’s had enough of grown adults getting mad at her, so she gets revenge by playing a trick on them.
The barista takes revenge on the angry customers by having her colleague pretend to fire her.
The high school student says that it happens regularly that people walk into the café “angry about such small things. Like literally exploding for nothing”.
“How sad,” she wrote, “it takes a grown man to vent your anger at high school and college kids.”
So she and her colleague James, a shift manager, decided to have a little fun with the next angry customer who entered the cafe.
Sure enough, she soon had a customer “who was getting upset about us not making the coffee hot enough” – a problem she says she can’t even solve, since the coffee comes directly from a machine.
Instead, she and James threw their trick.
After asking what the problem was and listening to the client’s rant, James looked at the high schooler and said, “this is unacceptable, you’re fired.”
Then the high schooler replied, “No please don’t fire me, my family needs the money, I need this job, please,” to which James replied. telling him to take off his apron and get out.
She writes that the angry client immediately backed down, telling James, “It’s not that big of a deal, you don’t need to fire her for that. I didn’t mean it.”
But James didn’t give up on the ruse, and after it worked so well the first time around, the barista says they’ve tried it on several angry customers since.
And she says “almost every time the person who got mad will apologize and say they didn’t mean it.”
“It’s pretty satisfying,” she went on to write, “making people realize that their actions might actually have consequences.”
This satisfaction is certainly linked to anyone who has ever worked in customer service.
But the barista’s friends believed the prank was meant to make people think they’d just ruined someone’s livelihood.
Most reviewers agreed that the barista’s prank was not only funny, but also a good way to teach naughty customers a lesson.
“It’s a perfect way to deal with unfriendly customers,” wrote one user. “Yeah that’s hilarious and I hope it teaches them a lesson,” another person commented.
“And when hostile customers try to backtrack on what they’re saying, it’s worth it,” added a Redditor.
Others pointed out that the stuffing had an unintended side benefit. “These customers will most likely be embarrassed and avoid coming back to the store. It’s a win-win!”
Although some hoped customers would return, purely for how it would raise the stakes for the comedic trickery.
One user wrote, “I think it would be even funnier if they were happy with [the firing] then they came back, only to see [the barista] still works there.”
“Potential explanations of ‘oh he was my twin brother, but now it’s my job to support my dying mother and my six siblings,’ would be hilarious.”
Who said work couldn’t be fun?
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.