'She messed with the wrong student; she never complained again': Barista student schools Karen customer after one too many coffee ‘remakes’

Working in customer service, hospitality, retail, or any other field that requires you to have human interaction with Karens on a daily basis, gives you a strong backbone you never asked for, and bucketloads of apathy. At first, you feel like a failure when a customer screams at you, demanding a free refill because your coffee tastes like the back of a dump truck. You realize it's ridiculous that a total stranger has the power to make you feel like a blundering fool, all over a cup of coffee. Eventually, you become passive to high-pitched requests and can win a staring contest with a troll.

In this case, a student was studying at a hospitality school and had to make coffee as part of their classes. OP explained that they dealt with difficult customers on a daily basis, stating they were actually 'the worst of the worst'. One customer in particular, who we'll call 'Ellen', made OP's life particularly miserable, resending her coffee back every single time she got it because it wasn't 'hot enough'. OP observed that Ellen was letting her coffee sit in front of her grubby fingers for about 10 minutes before complaining each time, so OP realized that the culprit was in fact, time, rather than her own coffee-making skills.

Ellen continuously harassed the working students, obviously leading a very miserable existence and deciding to take it out on poor, unassuming souls. So OP hatched a plan that included some good old petty revenge. Scroll down to read the full, detailed account of events. For more stories like this, here is an employee who got his new boss fired via malicious compliance that included listening to a little too carefully to his boss's orders during a power outage in a rural area.