You quack me up

I haven't told you yet but my favourite barista left my coffee shop to work at the yoghurt place next door - don't ask. I'm not quite ready to have yoghurt for breakfast yet, so I let him leave and waited with baited breath to meet his replacement. Who turns out to be cute, but dumb as a stump.

I have been training him for the last 2 weeks or so, and he's only screwed up twice, which is pretty good. But this morning, he made an absolute cracker.

There are two types of filtered coffee on the go every morning - light, and dark. Clearly being the caffeine freak that I am, I need to order the dark otherwise my old heart simply does not start pumping like it should. Dependence issues? Probably.

Anyway, the rookie calls me up to the counter, and I place my usual order for "a large dark with room for cream". Bear in mind that I very rarely deviate from this order. So he says, "a large latte?". I breathed in patiently, "Uh no," I replied "a large DARK with room for cream".

"A large duck?"

I wanted to die.

So I stared at him for a second and let it all sink in.

Then the dude making the coffees (who I think owns the place) says to him "No dummy, why would she order a duck? She said dark: D-A-R-K."

The rookie barista didn't even look embarassed that he'd misheard me. And even though I roll my r's when I say "water" or "whatever", I just can't bring myself to roll them in the middle of a word. Not yet, anyway.

But in future, perhaps I should stay out of the barnyard and just order light coffees from now on.