How To Ask a Mumbling Customer To Repeat Themselves Instead of Quitting on the Spot

I’m one of those fairy tale stories your mama read to you growing up. One of those designer clad glamoristas strutting down the runway of life. That’s right, I’ve been…say it with me…working at a café throughout the pandemic! With the presence of plexiglass, multiple masks, and the ASMR whisper craze sweeping the nation, details of an order can get very fuzzy. Made worse by the fact that 80% of the purchasing public mutters under their breath like their coffee preference is our little secret.

I ask once, twice, sometimes three times to repeat. They often get annoyed, encouraging me to disassociate. I’m like a sleep deprived parent trying to soothe an ugly, crying baby; I juggle oat milk cortados, pumpkin muffins, the key to the bathroom. Is this what you want? No? How about this?

Fellow service workers, heed this call: The next time you’re confronted with a blaring sound system or a stranger’s vocal resemblance to a cartoon mouse, do not clarify. I repeat, do not martyr yourself on the altar of getting an order ‘right’ !!!!

Here is a list of things you may wanna try instead:

1.) Offer them money, sex or drugs if they’ll leave the store now.          

2.) Turn the music down, despite your manager’s handwritten directive to “try it at this level” with the tacked on reminder that “ambience is important.” 

3.) Hand them a cup of drip coffee while saying “we’re having trouble with the machine.” This could read as the reason you couldn’t make them what they actually ordered or a vague warning about the drink they did. 

4.) Play that Black-Eyed Peas song where one guy goes “pump it” and the other responds “LOUDER” 

5.) Pay $150 dollars for a Masterclass membership. Register for Energy Healing taught by Antonio Banderas. Use everything he teaches you to channel your customer’s aura, getting a precise reading on which plant based milk they’d like. 

6.) Set the expected level by greeting them in a booming baritone. Call up your best impression of a ringmaster at the circus and invite them to do the same. 

7.) Ask them to hold your stuff while you tie your shoe. Then hand them a microphone. 

8.) Imagine you are Horton the Elephant (from the Seussical canon of literature and film) and the customer is a little tiny Who on a flower. Now you won’t be angry at them for whispering “can you do it half sweet?” It’s not their fault they’re so small and inaudible to your big floppy ears.

9.) Revolutionize linguistics by co-authoring a new dialect using only eyebrow movement.

10.) Take pity on them for lacking your rich community theatre background. Not everyone knows how to project. We weren’t all taught to tip-of-the-tongue-the-teeth-the-lips our way through the world.

11.) Keep your phone [prop pager optional] nearby. After the customer’s third garbled attempt at ordering a mocha, fake a family or state wide emergency. Grab your tips and your jacket. Head to the nearest cinema. Watch something with Keanu Reeves in it.