ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact
The cafe inside a Betoota Grove shopping centre that’s a popular haunt for many of the old matriarchs of our town’s pastoral and mining industry was the scene of an epic blow-up this afternoon over a coffee that arrived too cold.
While shoppers run in and out of Coles, past the bakery and butchers, the Demensha Cafe is an oasis for tired shoppers and carers who need a place to park their elderly clients while they themselves get a rest.
One of the waiters there, Dylan, took the order from an elderly customer who made a point of having their coffee served as close to boiling as the laws of thermal dynamics would allow.
However, the coffee that the barista made was only slightly below boiling.
Our reporter was on the scene as Dame Beryl Overell, great-great aunt to The Advocate’s editor Clancy Overell, went off the rails.
“Oh for heaven’s sake,” she said.
“Can’t these fools do anything? I said hot!”
Dame Overell’s carer tried to explain that skim milk doesn’t react well to being at temperatures over a hundred degrees but the former socialite wouldn’t have a bar of it.
“How hard is it? You heat the milk up until our time-space continuum begins to bend and time begins to slip. One minute of steaming the milk at the machine equals seven minutes at our booth. I know what I want. I told that idiot I wanted milk so hot that it’d form a supermassive black hole and suck every sorry old duck like me through it to a new dimension where waiters and baristas can do their job!”
As Dylan walked back pasted Dame Overell’s table, however, she chose not to say anything. Just scowl at him.
“He might be an idiot but I’m not rude enough to give him a dressing down in public.”
More to come.
