Someone who serves coffee and doughnuts at Tim’s is not a barista.
There’s no steamed milk. There’s no foam. There’s no chance in hell you’re going to get an espresso and the hot-chocolate comes out of a machine.
Hence, no barista. Coffee server? Sure. Barista? No.
Anyhow - they make a mean doughnut at Tim’s. Their sammy’s are pretty good too.
Buck up - it’s the joys of customer service. 
One of the “Who’s Talking” movies had the John Travolta cab-driver character giving a description of “Black” vs. “Regular” vs. “Light”, etc. He was playing a NY cabbie I think.
Charles Kuralt’s autobiography (A life on the Road?)did a similar description. I have neither at my disposal right now but the “regular”, “light”, thing seems to be known in New York.
A McDonalds in Boston mixed my cream & sugar for me, too, FWIW.
With all due respect to pretty much every other Canadian, I really find it hard to drink Tim Horton’s coffee (and pretty much every other donut store coffee I’ve ever had). I adore their wonderful donuts, but rarely have more than one or two a year (a sad necessity for my already over-developed waist-line).
jin, you’ll have to come up for one of the Toronto-area Dopefests, and we’ll send you back with a car-load of Timbits. My treat.
lola, my heart goes out to you. I’ve sometimes observed that Tim Horton’s attracts the worst elements of Canadian society (especially obnoxious teenagers). Which, I guess, suggests that we’re not all that bad off. Just you get to deal with it.
Never heard of someone else sugar-and-creaming coffee for you. This must be a Canadian thing. The only thing I pray for when I buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks is that there will be half and half in the cream carafes so I’m not forced to use milk or two percent. (The coffee won’t be the right color and consistency if it’s just milk. Gotta have half and half.)
And I wish they would go back to using sugar shakers instead of just packets of sugar; aren’t they supposed to be some kind of New Age We Care About the World kind of place? Why waste all that paper, and make me stand there like a moron tearing open tiny packets for ten minutes? And has anybody else ever been as annoyed as me when they run out of white sugar, and all that’s left are those little packets of brown “Sugar In the Raw,” or whatever the hell it is? That stuff’s nasty! Doesn’t melt, and makes your coffee taste funky.
I guess this was a hijack. Pardon me. I was carried away by my Starbucks pet peeves.
CARRY ON. 
This is why I get my morning caffeine fix at a specialty coffee joint. I walk in (generally dazed and confused) and one of the two “baristas” who has been working there forever (I mean, they KNOW when you’ve changed your hairstyle for pete sake!!!) says “Sludge 3 shots”? I nod and smile stupidly and hand her my punch card.
I have never figured out the whole “Tall, or Grande” thing, so if coherent, I say medium, if I have to, but they generally know.
On another note, not all customers are snotty/mean, when baristas make mistakes.
One of the girls at “my” coffee shop consistantly makes it a large instead of a medium, which everyone finds kindof funny, it’s like a mental block, because as soon as she does it, she gets this look and goes “Oh, no, that’s a 16 oz, not a 20, why do I do that”? And I just say “ach, that’s okay” and tip them anyway.
Only on Planet Cuckoo does one “build” oneself a cup of coffee in the morning.
Sounds like they’re dehydrated - or maybe they don’t drink enough beer, or something. I ain’t never seen orange piss on the floor of a Dublin pub. Eeeugh.
Interestingly, jjimm, eliminating vitamin B makes your pee darker. Metabolizing alcohol uses up vitamin B. Hence, the beer comment.
And a hearty GRRRRRRRR, and other disgruntled noises, to alice and dietrologia.
Who drinks 20 ounces of coffee at one sitting??
Me, I’ll never ever get the hang of the shots and the grandes and all those other things. To me it’s forever a binary choice: a cup or a pocillo (demitasse), black or con leche, sweetened or not, sugar or aspartame; maybe an espresso, which will be a demitasse, unmixed with anything else, sugar on the side.
But, yeah, if the stuff is made a-la-carte you should specify what you want, or take what you’re given.
Wait a minute. Are you daring to tell me that a place selling Baked Goods does not have 10,000 immediately salable examples of every single product it produces on hand at any given moment?
Shocked! Shocked I say!
(Warning: Post may contain some Sarcasm.)
Well, I would hope not!
Erin go bragh, BTW!
WHO THE HELL IS EMMA?!?!?!?!
Scroll up: Emma is kung fu lola.
Well you see, if someone would have just pointed that out to me sooner, I wouldn’t have had to make this scene. Sheesh.
You expect me to read an entire thread, like I don’t have the attention span of a ferret on crack?