Intrigue at the 'Bucks

I was at an alien Starbucks yesterday - not the home 'bucks where they fix my drink without comment - where I ordered a Tall Americano.  I'm not sure what this drink is anymore or if I even like it - it's more of a routine than anything else.  In fact, every now and then I order something different just to fuck with them and they bring me the Tall Americano anyhow.  "Tall" in Starbucks means "small."  If you want a medium sized drink you order a "Grande" which actually means "Large" in Spanish.  I'm not sure why they're using a Spanish word to designate sizes in what is ostensibly an Italian-themed coffee shop but I don't question the wisdom of Starbucks.  Maybe it means Large in Italian, too - what do I look like, a language major.  And the final nail in the linguistics coffin is a large drink is a "Venti" which I believe means twenty in Italian so I got no idea about that one.

Anyway, the Tall drink comes in a Tall cup.  Sometimes they don't have any clean Tall cups so they put my drink in a Venti cup.  I'm OK with this, generally speaking, as long as the proportion of espresso to water stays the same.  If you take the espresso - a fixed amount - and then fill the much larger Venti cup with water all the way to the rim you get a diluted coffee drink.  I think. This is what happened at the road Starbucks.

I generally don't complain about caffeine delivery systems but today was different, to my detriment.

"Pardon me," I said with exquisite politeness.  "This is a tall drink and you filled the venti cup -which is bigger - with water all the way to the top."  I didn't elaborate.  It seemed clear to me what the problem was.  Diluted espresso.

"I'm sorry," said the barista, pouring a third of the drink out and handing the cup back to me with a smile.

I had to pause a beat, collect myself.

"Well, you just poured out a third of the espresso - which I dearly want - with the excess water," I pointed out, handing the cup back over the counter.  I was in for the duration at this point, regretting my decision to even bring up the whole matter of the water.  If I had kept my mouth shut I would even then be drinking the full amount of espresso and tolerating the extra water.

She held onto the cup and looked at me.  She wasn't angry but confused.

"So you want more water in the cup?" she said tentatively.

"Would it be possible to remake the drink and not fill the cup full of water?" I offered, punting back to square one, clearly on the run at this point.

Clearly relieved, she emptied the cup, and began to remake the drink.  I felt kind of like an ass for some reason so I tried to explain the mathematics around the water to espresso proportion to this woman who did not care at this point and barely paid any attention to me at all.  It reminded me of looking over the shoulder of an English teacher in high school who was trying to calculate the average of two test scores.  She added 82 to 78 for a total of 160 which she then divided by 2 to reach the correct conclusion that the average was 80.  She wrote down these numbers on a scrap of paper to do the math.