Would you refund someone if you drank from his or her cup?

This thought was posted on Thinkaloo on 2 April 2008 by member pedvieira86

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I witnessed this incident in a bookstore cafe. The cafe had a large round sofa with small tables in between for people to place their drinks. Next to me was sitting a woman in her thirties and next to her was a guy in his twenties. There was a table between them where they both placed their cups of coffee. The cups looked identical and they were placed too close to each other.

The guy and the woman seemed very absorbed at what they were reading. At some point the woman, apparently by mistake and without realizing it, grabbed the guy's cup and sipped from it. After a while the guy realizes it as there is lipstick on his cup!

The guy then starts complaining to the woman next to him. She apologizes. He then asks her to refund his coffee since she had just admitted it was her fault. The woman apologizes again but refuses to give a refund. The guy then becomes irritated and they get in an argument. The woman does not bulge, so he goes to the shop's cashier nearby to complain.

It gets better. The guy starts talking to the person at the cashier and he keeps pointing at the woman. At some point the woman who is watching this goes over the counter where the arguing gets louder and I can hear them very clearly!

The guy who had asked for the manager in the meantime demands that the shop refunds him for the mistake the woman had done. The manager agrees to do so! The woman, however, is very upset at all this and asks from the shop to not refund this guy because it was not the shop's fault what the customer had done with his cup of coffee...

Interesting huh? It gets better...

The cafe manager finally settles the dispute by offering to buy both the woman and the guy a new cup of coffee. The woman gets her coffee first and goes to sit back at her seat. The guy's coffee takes a bit more time to prepare, so by the time he is ready to go back to his seat, a friend of the woman who had just arrived a few minutes earlier takes his seat. At this point the cafe is crowded and there is no other seat where the guy can sit! Shit happened, right?

You can probably imagine what happened next. The guy becomes very upset and he starts arguing with the two ladies that this was his seat and that they should give it back to him...

Wish I had a camera with me to videotape this incident. It was one of those very rare incidents where you catch people arguing too much and in a somewhat absurd manner for things that seem too trivial. Or are they?

What do you think? Should the woman have refunded the guy? Why did the shop owner agree to refund the guy if it was the shop's fault? Why did the woman demand that the shop not refund the guy?

Any chance these two might have been a team of actors playing some kind of trick on a TV show? I looked around but there was no camera or TV crew...

I don't know. What would you have done if you had found yourself in that situation? If you had sipped someone else's coffee by mistake? Would you refund it?