Salty Teens Drag Coffee Shop that Shares Name with Fictional Cafe in National Exam Question

We aren’t above dragging an Australian coffee shop or cafe on social media, especially when they deserve it. We’ll call out the one that wants you to assemble your own avocado toast. We’ll point our fingers at the one that moved overnight because of a property dispute. And we’re pretty much required to shout about the avolatte every seven to ten days until forever.

But one Melbourne-area cafe doesn’t deserve any of the hate that it’s currently getting online, because it has nothing to do with its vibe, its service, or what it does to its avocados. Instead, the Calmer Cafe is being hit with shitty review after shitty review because a fictional cafe with (almost) the same name was used on a massive standardized test.

Students in the Australian state of Victoria can complete the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) during 11th and 12th grade, and most students who plan on attending college do so. There are currently more than 120 different VCE studies, with accompanying exams. According to The Guardian, this year’s VCE English exam made some 40,000 students analyze a review about a supposedly made-up coffee shop called Calmer Coffee.

“Calmer Coffee is another example of an ever-creeping shift toward soulless franchises that can be found in airports around the world,” the exam question read, along with mentions of a “tablet wielding” barista with a man-bun, its burnt coffee, and all of its soy and almond milks.

That “fake”-in-air-quotes coffee shop is causing a lot of real-life shit for the Calmer Days, Calmer Nights Cafe, which is located in a small Melbourne suburb. Immediately after the test, students started leaving one-star Google reviews for that Calmer Cafe online, accusing it of everything from its “burnt, bland coffee” to its terrible service to “some ignoramus with a man bun” who was serving drinks.

“We’ve got about five high schools in walking distance of where we are. We didn’t know until one of the students showed us the question and we started getting all these Facebook messages,” owner Tara Conron told SmartCompany. “I’m studying for my own uni exams at the moment, I don’t need this shit,” she added.

Conron is attempting to make the best of it: In a Facebook post, she said that any student who mentioned “THAT exam question” would get a free small coffee. But she’s also planning for the worst. The Age reports that Conron has contacted an attorney, and is considering legal action against the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA) over the similarities between her shop and the test question. (In addition to the name, she does have an employee with a man-bun, and one of the cafe’s managers shares a last name with the ‘fictional’ reviewer also mentioned in the test question).

The VCAA has apologized for its mistake, but that doesn’t exactly solve the problem of those one-star reviews right now. “The VCAA had checked and confirmed that there was no registered business with the name ‘Calmer Coffee’ prior to today’s examination,” a spokesperson told SmartCompany. “The VCAA has apologised for the inadvertent similarity in business names that led to the surge of social media and web posts, and has offered its assistance to have these posts removed as soon as possible.”

Sigh. This is pretty much why every phone number in a movie starts starts with a 555. Come on, teens. Be smarter. Save your online vitriol for real baristas and real cafes that have really wronged you—like by serving a latte out of a damn avocado.