The thing about ordering extra hot coffee is that there’s a limit. With milk, if you steam above a certain level, the liquid separates. The watery bits sink, while the hard bits that have coagulated surface which always causes problems. As for water, there’s only one temperature setting on the machine, which also causes problems: “An extra hot long black,” a woman once asked.

“The water can’t be any hotter,” I said.

“Why not?”

“It comes out of the machine at 90 degrees.”

“Turn it up”

“It’s not a kettle.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Extra hot it is.”

“Thank you,” she said but in a facetious way.

In hospitality, the majority of requests either contradict or don’t make sense. But in the spirit of not offending customers, you need to give the illusion that the request is, in fact, ingenious. “An extra hot long black, you ask? Why didn’t I think of that? I’d be delighted.”

Then comes the part where you have to think of crafty ways to make the water seem hotter. Usually, I place the cup into a pool of boiling water. But there’s no set-in-stone technique. I know one barista who refuses to steam milk above luke-warm (it’s a speciality coffee thing) and if anyone requests an extra hot coffee he zaps a mug in the grill for a few minutes. “The customers can’t tell the difference between a hotter mug and hotter water,” he said.

Deception isn't preferable. But if no one knows the difference, what's the harm? Sometimes I don't bother with skinny milk for a similar reason, especially if the customer snubs full-cream for having too much fat content, then asks for a couple of sugars and a lavish doughnut. After all, who’s the real culprit there? Besides, when I do give a skinny-milk drinker full-cream, I usually get the following response, “Wow, the coffee tastes good today.” So I’m doing a favour, really.

The confusion over what is what carries through to coffee types, too. Often, a customer will order a latte and flat white. And sometimes a cappuccino with no chocolate as well. Technically, the only difference between these three orders is the vessel in which the coffee is served and, if you want to get fussy, the amount of foam. Flat whites are served in a cup and have the least amount of foam; cappuccinos are also served in a cup and have the most foam. Lattes, meanwhile, live in a glass and, foam-wise, is somewhere in-between the former two. But when the cafe’s busy and the barista is pressed for time and the coffees are all takeaway, there is no difference.

"A flat white, latte and a cappuccino with no foam, please," a customer once asked.

"So, three lattes, then?"

"No, I said, a flat white, latte and cappuccino with no foam."

Customers can be very insistent as if they're defending some foundational belief system. "What! You're saying a takeaway latte and a cappuccino with no chocolate are the same thing? Ha! And I suppose you're also going to tell me the world isn't flat, either. " You don't want to challenge them further, the same way you wouldn't go out of your way to prove to a child the Easter Bunny isn't real.

Eventually, the customer collected the three identical takeaways, walked outside and, shortly after, returned to the bench and said, “But what’s what?” She glided a hand over the three black lids which I'd forgotten to mark.

In an eenie-meenie-miney-moe fashion, I said, “that’s the latte, that’s the flat white, and that’s the cappuccino with no foam.”

“But how do you know?” she asked.

“Umm.”

She scoffed.

God knows what would've happened if I told her the truth. So I relented. “I’ll just do them again for you.”