Yours was much more in the spirit of a proper barista AU!
Mine, on the other hand, just goes wherever it wants to go.
Like, because of Spock's Vulcan drink, this particular coffee bar has started attracting a lot of the non-Human officers working at Command. And Uhura is working in one of the nearby buildings as part of a special project/training she's involved with, and therefore coming to the coffee bar and bringing some of her xenolinguistics colleagues with her, and they start a discussion about the universality of the watering-hole and sharing/providing liquid as a welcoming custom, and lure Spock into it, and then they start thinking about ways to provide other communal stimulant/drinks without having to fall back on the replicator, and Scotty gets drafted again, and before long there are half-a-dozen other non-coffee options (starting with a hot kola drink that Uhura likes, and moving farther afield from there.)
The upshot is that, eventually somebody way up in the Starfleet hierarchy with too much authority and too much self-importance finds out that Kirk is pretty much drawing an admiral's pay for working in the office coffee bar, and Kirk's direct boss says sorry but cuts him loose. But by that point it's the best place in Starfleet Command San Francisco to get everybody's favorite stimulant - including quite a few offworld diplomats, and of course still really good coffee - so there are quite a few Very Important People willing to stand up for Kirk & co.
Of course there are also quite a few Very Important People who got tired of Kirk's shenanigans a long time ago and are making noises about the dignity of rank and dereliction of duty, etc. etc.
...and then I seriously have no idea what happens next. They all quit Starfleet and start Enterprise Coffee two streets down and it turns into a standard barista AU? They start a campaign to make flag-officers do a certain number of hours of yeoman's work every month, and incidentally also increase drinks diversity in Starfleet? Kirk gets court-martialed and there is a Moment of Crowning Awesome where he speaks out for the importance of shared hot drinks to galactic unity, and he accidentally makes peace with the Klingons in the process? The Marcuses and/or Saavik turn up after all, and I end up retelling the plot of The Wrath of Khan only with more coffee and less dead Spock (in this version he only gets scalded with boiling water rather than dying of radiation poisoning)?
Also it probably ought to be a fluffy Kirk/Spock romance but I kind of fail epically at keeping that sort of thing under control, as you can probably tell. <_<
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Mine, on the other hand, just goes wherever it wants to go.
Like, because of Spock's Vulcan drink, this particular coffee bar has started attracting a lot of the non-Human officers working at Command. And Uhura is working in one of the nearby buildings as part of a special project/training she's involved with, and therefore coming to the coffee bar and bringing some of her xenolinguistics colleagues with her, and they start a discussion about the universality of the watering-hole and sharing/providing liquid as a welcoming custom, and lure Spock into it, and then they start thinking about ways to provide other communal stimulant/drinks without having to fall back on the replicator, and Scotty gets drafted again, and before long there are half-a-dozen other non-coffee options (starting with a hot kola drink that Uhura likes, and moving farther afield from there.)
The upshot is that, eventually somebody way up in the Starfleet hierarchy with too much authority and too much self-importance finds out that Kirk is pretty much drawing an admiral's pay for working in the office coffee bar, and Kirk's direct boss says sorry but cuts him loose. But by that point it's the best place in Starfleet Command San Francisco to get everybody's favorite stimulant - including quite a few offworld diplomats, and of course still really good coffee - so there are quite a few Very Important People willing to stand up for Kirk & co.
Of course there are also quite a few Very Important People who got tired of Kirk's shenanigans a long time ago and are making noises about the dignity of rank and dereliction of duty, etc. etc.
...and then I seriously have no idea what happens next. They all quit Starfleet and start Enterprise Coffee two streets down and it turns into a standard barista AU? They start a campaign to make flag-officers do a certain number of hours of yeoman's work every month, and incidentally also increase drinks diversity in Starfleet? Kirk gets court-martialed and there is a Moment of Crowning Awesome where he speaks out for the importance of shared hot drinks to galactic unity, and he accidentally makes peace with the Klingons in the process? The Marcuses and/or Saavik turn up after all, and I end up retelling the plot of The Wrath of Khan only with more coffee and less dead Spock (in this version he only gets scalded with boiling water rather than dying of radiation poisoning)?
Also it probably ought to be a fluffy Kirk/Spock romance but I kind of fail epically at keeping that sort of thing under control, as you can probably tell. <_<