Image borrowed from Necessary Therapy
People don’t find this out until something has backfired on them, but blogging should carry a warning label — blog at your own risk.¬† Besides possibly keeping you from being hired and making your family and friends hate you, one innocent blog post — or a series of them, in one case — can have super amplified results in the real world.
Take the angry coffee customer. You can chalk it up to lack of caffeine — or too much of it — but he really got mad when his barista wouldn’t give him a triple espresso on ice.
Not Jeff Simmermon, whose request for a triple shot of espresso over ice at Murky Coffee in Arlington County turned into a heated Internet squabble, sparked debate about whether the customer is always right and provided a reminder about the intended and unintended consequences of blogging.
The drink request Sunday, said Simmermon, who was visiting from Brooklyn, was denied by a barista who told him that Murky doesn’t do espresso over ice. Irked, Simmermon said he asked for a triple espresso and a cup of ice, which he said the barista provided, grudgingly.
Service. No smile.
Then — and this is Simmermon’s account — the barista scolded him, saying that what he was doing to his espresso was “not okay” and that the store’s policy was to preserve the integrity of the drink. The employee said that allowing customers to dilute espresso was not in keeping with said policy.
Coffee-rage moment in 3, 2, 1 . . .
Simmermon, 32, said that he interrupted the barista with an angry blast about how he would have his coffee any way he pleased, thank you very much, and that he told the barista he had his own policy about doing what he wants with the products he pays for. He mixed in a couple of expletives, but that was the essence of it.
That might have been the end of the saga, but Simmermon did what comes naturally to literate victims of perceived everyday injustices in the 21st century.
He blogged about it.
That blog post beget a blog post from the coffee shop’s owner, who defended his barista and blasted the customer in an open letter on his shop’s Web site. The brouhaha resulted in a spike in traffic to both sites, but in the end, what happened? Both are ready to move on. Is everyone happy? Not quite. But, I think, they blew off some steam. (Read the full story, its very amusingly written.)
Oh, but that’s not all. Two anonyblogs (well, the FC blog is a psuedo-anonyblog) in an uproar over Claremont’s own personal cookie monster (aka Mayor Ellen Taylor; I’m not judging, that’s just how she seems to be known now) have helped draw an apology and possibly inspired a new ordinance that would require a solicitor to get a permit and undergo background checks (except for non-profits, as in the case of the Girl Scout cookie incident that sparked the brouhaha).
Bottom line? If you decide to blog, be prepared to accept the consequences. And I say that in all seriousness. Sort of.