When you run a blog that anonymously posts poison-pen critiques of the customers who come into your store, you know you’re running the risk of losing that job should your employer find out.

And that’s apparently what happened to Matt Johnson, the creator of BitterBarista.com, and until recently an actual barista in Seattle.

The blog itself is really just a collection of zingers directed at what Johnson tells the Seattle Times were “the 5 percent who I guess make our job more difficult and don’t treat us as human beings.”

Some choice updates:
“I would remember your usual drink if you were a more memorable person.”

“What a coincidence! You have a gluten allergy, and I don’t care that you have a gluten allergy!”

“You can say ‘2% milk’ all damn day. You’re getting whole milk.”

The site, which never named the store where all this took place, was only up for a few weeks before the folks at Sprudge.com unmasked Matt as the author, and called him out for the anger directed at customers in his posts.

“[W]hile we love the well-worn barista cliché, it should be the stuff of mild parody,” wrote Sprudge, “not an all-out assault on whomever walks through the door of your cafe.”

Matt tells the Times that after word got around that he was the Bitter Barista, he e-mailed his boss, trying to make the case that the very few customers that had seen the site “are huge fans…This isn’t bad press, it’s actually really good press… it could turn out to be a fun something that gives the place a little spike in publicity.”

But that boss, who had also been poked fun at on the site, disagrees.

“I represent the business, the customers and the staff,” he explains to the Times. “I can’t endorse what he was saying, whether humorous or not. It puts me in a difficult position, where if I don’t respond that means I endorse what he’s saying.”

Matt was then dismissed from his job, though he says he’s received offers from other area coffee shops.

None of this has stopped him from posting on BitterBarista

“My ex-boss thinks the website is gonna stop because I don’t work there anymore,” he wrote after being fired. “Man, I didn’t even work there when I worked there!”

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