This piece is dedicated to Weihong Zhang, our excellent Patreon supporter whom we love and appreciate.
By Lanny Huang
DETROIT, MI— At approximately 8:26pm last Sunday, sources reported that local barista Miles Thomas lost a distribution screw down the drain at the coffee shop where he’d just started working during a solo closing shift.
“It happened so fast,” Thomas, clearly still in shock, told us via Skype from the Swedish Embassy in Ecuador.
“I was soaking it in a cup and I just dumped it in the sink. They told me on my first day there would be immeasurable consequences if I’d lost it.”
Thomas told us that while delivering this warning, the lead barista had pantomimed throat-slitting while making intense eye contact.
After being unable to recover the screw from the drain, Thomas told us he immediately left the cafe, emptied his bank account, packed whatever he could into a suitcase, and took the next flight to Ecuador, where he hoped to find safe haven.
When reached for comment, management at Thomas’s cafe sent us this statement: “The screws actually only cost a few dollars to replace. If new hires knew that, they’d lose them all the time and it would be a huge pain in the ass.”
When asked if they might revise their training protocol, the manager replied, “We can’t really think of anything that works better than what we’ve been doing.”
At the time of this writing, the whereabouts of Miles Thomas are unknown and he hasn’t been seen or heard from in 48 hours. Anybody with information regarding his whereabouts are encouraged to notify the authorities.
Lanny Huang used to be a barista. Now he runs latte art throwdowns in New York City and wants your judging panels to be more diverse.
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