Here’s my “black coffee” this morning.
Double infuriating: everytime I tell people that “baristas” and coffee people can’t comprehend the concept of black coffee, I get back talk. Here’s the first coffee I’ve ordered in 10 years because of this persistent problem, guess what, they lived up to the complaint… they can’t formulate the concept of black coffee in their own mind.
Having worked at a fast food burger place, there’s absolutely people that will order a “cheeseburger” and be surprised when there’s cheese. Not many, but it happened to me a couple times. We were also trained that “plain” means no onion and pickle, but leave the ketchup and mustard on as that’s how our PoS defined the term.
if I went to a restaurant and I asked for a plain burger and they still supplied condiments, it’s going back. That’s not what a plain burger is by definition, I’ve only ever gotten plain burgers without condiments though so I haven’t experienced this. I assume they did it that way as a “well if they wanted no condiments they would specify dry” but thats still an off case.
I don’t agree with normalizing to the niche/off cases (such as your cheeseburger example). Definitions in the field should be what people generally expect. In most of the english speaking world, a cheeseburger has cheese, and a black coffee means no milk/cream, usually no sugar, I could understand them adding sugar to it, although it would annoy me, but to add milk to a black coffee is not explainable.