There was a six month span of time in my late teenage years when I worked for a small, local coffee shop known as Starbucks.

If you’ve ever worked for Starbucks, you know that it’s an overall fantastic job; probably the best someone just out of high school can hope for. You can have as many free drinks as you want all day long, spend the entire shift joking around with your co-workers, and get paid really well for the little work that you do – mostly from tips.

That being said, the interesting part to this story doesn’t involve my complete workday, rather one lapse in judgment — or so people tell me — that invoked my getting fired.

As I mentioned before, becoming close with your co-workers is fairly common-place at Starbucks; camaraderie is strongly encouraged. During the latter part of my tenure at Starbucks, I became good friends with a shy female coworker, who just so happened to be pregnant and unmarried. For the life of me, I can’t seem to recollect her name, but that isn’t essential. Anyways, as her and I developed our friendship, she became more comfortable around me and eventually began to divulge her pregnancy aches and pains, among other things in her life, upon me. In time, we developed a very close, personal relationship.

One day – about seven months into her pregnancy — we got to talking as usual, and for whatever reason, she ended up telling me that she had started lactating and experiencing all of these discomforts in her breasts.

This instantly aroused my interest (and surprisingly enough, my privates), and I started asking questions about how it worked, how much came out, the consistency of the milk, if there was an odor – things of that nature. Eventually I got bold enough to ask if she had tasted the milk and upon her confirmation, what it tastes like; she said “a little sweet, different than regular milk.” I jokingly (but probably half seriously) said to her that I wouldn’t mind a sample of the milk. She gave me this awkward, nervous look and I said something to the effect of “No wait, time out, I didn’t mean straight from the teat, but in a saucer or something.” We laughed it off, and that was that.

The next day at work, my boss called me to the side and told me he overheard what I had said about wanting to taste her breast milk. My pregnant friend hadn’t complained to him or said anything about it bothering her, he just assumed it had. He thought it would be best to use this opportunity to fire me because A) “I never liked you much to be honest. You drink way too many free drinks.” and B) “That’s sexual harassment dude.” He also said that because of the circumstances of my getting fired, he was going to withhold my tip share for the week. So much for “as many free drinks as you want,” “joke around with your co-workers,” and “great pay.”

I reluctantly signed some paperwork agreeing to my termination, said goodbye to some friends and left the store. I walked out of there with the despairing feeling in my gut knowing that I was just fired from a job for asking a co-worker to taste her breast milk. Since my cessation of employment at Starbucks, the idea of tasting breast milk has become an annoying thorn in my side. It has developed into an unachievable goal, an impossible aspiration — one that I may very well never conquer. If any of you have accomplished said task, I implore you to relay your secret upon me for it is a mission that torments me even in my dreams. I’m sweating as I type this. Moving on.

For what it’s worth, I did go to the Starbucks across the street after I left and grabbed my free pound of coffee for the week plus a few free drinks with my employee discount.

To this day I cringe when I drink Starbucks’ coffee. I haven’t heard from that girl in over five years. I wonder if she told her baby about me. Mom, if you ever read this story, I’m sorry I shared it with the internet. You can still be proud of me, right?