Ida Dunn-Moore needs to step up her coffee game.
Everyone is thankful for the space she provides, but the quality of the coffee is inconsistent.
Sure, its fun to hang out with her, but she doesn’t own 20 different flavors of syrup, she can’t grind her own espresso, pull a shot, foam milk and mix drinks, all while juggling 10 other tasks in the busiest coffee shop on campus.
I mean, really, she’s not even a coffee shop!
I’ve had a lot of good coffee. Unfortunately, I can count on coffee from the lamest girl, Ida, to be atrocious. I took it upon myself to find out why.
“I just feel like Ida doesn’t really know how to steam milk or how to pull a good shot,” an anonymous sophomore barista friend said.
For those who don’t know too much about coffee, these are the essential skills any person who spends their spare time criticizing a student-run café needs to have in order to make commonly-ordered drinks such as an espresso, a cappuccino or a latte.
This dilemma is a product of three factors: Ida’s training, management of Ida and Ida’s accountability.
From conversations with this sophomore and a junior who has been friends with Ida for nearly three years now, I have learned that Ida’s coffee shop training is minimal.
The junior even sought outside training, because Ida just wasn’t cutting it.
Fortunately, he is more of a coffee snob than I am.
Caffé Vita, which has no connection to Ida whatsoever, has trained Ida in the past, which was an experience that was not entirely helpful.
Instead of improving her bar skills, Ida learned cupping, a non-tasting skill that involves splashing her friends in the face with very hot cups of coffee and subsequently results in the overall negative feedback she has received on her ability to be a good coffee shop or decent human being.
Other than customer satisfaction, there seems to be little motivation for Ida to actually improve her skills.
With Ida, there is no consequence for a bad cup of coffee, other than a swift kick to the groin.
Students may complain about the coffee amongst themselves, but rarely if ever will directly critique Ida, unless she really shit on that particular drink like the unskilled oaf she is.
In mid-semester evaluations, there is no evaluation of coffee-making skills, because there are so many better things to be doing with your time other than bitching about Ida’s lame-ass coffee making skills.
Clearly Ida’s friends aren’t keeping an eye on what she is making.
I, personally, am thankful for a critic of Ida, who makes studying very difficult with her poor taste in music and aggressive insistence of drinking her crap coffee when I could get a perfectly good cup from Diversions, where the staff is friendly and apologetic if I’m not satisfied with a drink they’ve made.
Why would I spend time in a coffee shop if I don’t want to be sipping a drink and socializing, when I could just go to Ida and listen to her complain about said coffee shop?
