Australian strangers engage in weird, elaborate feud over their coffeeshop fandom
Sometimes, you just want to be unbelievably petty in service of your favorite micro-chain.
This, it seems, was the thinking of Fraser Harvey when he declared his undying love for a neighborhood coffeeshop by plastering a poster of his face on the cafe's wall. However, as The Guardian reports, this man with time to kill had no inkling of the feud he was about to ignite.
"The cafe near work doesn’t have a loyalty program so I made one for them," tweeted Harvey along with a picture of a poster he affixed to the walls of the Sensory Lab cafe in Melbourne.
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Unbeknownst to Harvey, there was another Sensory Lab super fan lurking in his midst. As Harvey documented in a series of alternatingly triumphant and bewildered tweets, his rival was willing to go to extreme lengths to put Harvey in his place.
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But it didn't stop there. Soon, Harvey returned to find a projector had been set up in the cafe to both figuratively and literally outshine his precious "larger certificate."
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That's when Harvey decided to get serious.
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But Harvey's rival wasn't screwing around, as evidenced by her new tattoo of the coffeeshop's logo.
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So what, exactly, was going on here? An elaborate marketing hoax, perhaps? The Guardian spoke with Sensory Lab founder Salvatore Malatesta, who insisted that this was not some scam to generate social media excitement.
"When I first saw it, I thought it was two creative agencies setting each other up," Malatesta explained to the The Guardian. "Or I thought they must know each other, they work in the same office. But they’ve never met."
Which, maybe that's believable? It wouldn't be the first time someone got a brand's logo tattooed on their body. Speaking of which, who the hell would get a tattoo just to one-up a complete stranger?
That would be urban planner Harriet Noall. She works above the coffeeshop, and insisted to The Guardian that both the tattoo and her devotion are real.
"It hurts," she said of the fresh ink. "[Proof is in] the fact that my tattoo is bleeding profusely."
No word yet on when Noall and Harvey will meet face to face and either A) fall instantly in love, romantic comedy style, or B) fight to the death. Either way, however, we're sure one of them will manage to get a tweet off documenting the dramatic conclusion before it all comes crashing down.
