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today we were going to have dinner with some friends after church, but they had to cancel. however, since we were planning on eating out, we really didn’t have anything in the kitchen to make for lunch. (i said dinner, but sunday dinner is lunch, and sunday supper is dinner. let’s just keep it straight.) so we went out just the four of us to the new japanese restaurant in marion, yamato.

it was absolutely delicious. i had the sushi supreme (yummmmmm) and gretchen had habachi steak. tasty. and ella had chicken and fried rice, which she barely touched.

so our waitress heather came over as we were finishing up and told us that somebody had paid our bill a few minutes before and that she did not know who they were. they had asked to be kept anonymous. well i knew two different families that were in there when we arrived, and among those two families there were a couple of sub-families each. so i don’t really know who bought our food, but i definitely appreciated it. however it did raise an interesting problem.

we were planning on paying with a debit card. neither of our wallets contained any cash. and the mystery payer didn’t tip our waitress. why would they? i don’t know that i would have thought of that either, honestly! but gretchen did. heather had this look of “i’m trying really hard not to let you see that i am pretty sure i’m not going to get a tip…so thanks so much for coming in.” i could tell she was worried, and with good reason. i doubted they were going to open a new check just to ring up a debit card gratuity. yikes!

last may, (**flashback to establish background for nest part of story**) when “kids” graduated from high school and college, my gifts account bought a $50 gift card for each college graduate. almost every one of them showed up for “graduation sunday” to receive their gift, but there was one who did not show. i called this individual several times, each time talking to a very kind, gracious automated voice mail receptionist. she was really nice. apparently, though, she did not do her job of relaying my messages to the graduate in question, because i never received a call back. i even said that i had a decent gift to give if only they would call me back. nothing. nothing for six months. i guess they don’t really care about it, right? well, i just so happened to have this card in my pocket. so i decided to put it to good use.

heather got a $50 prepaid visa debit card for doing a fantastic job waiting on us this afternoon. i wrote a note apologizing for leaving a non-cash tip, but i think she’ll be able to get over that. just think, if mystery payer hadn’t paid, i would still be wondering what to do with that poor, unwanted gift card. but somebody took good care of us, so we took good care of heather. pay it forward, and whatnot, you know?

ever had something like that happen to you? what’s the craziest thing you’ve left for a tip? or for you servers out there, what’s the craziest tip you’ve ever gotten?

Posted on November 1st, 2009 by deWeb
Filed under: Uncategorized