Overtipping at Subway

*I wrote this sometime in October of 2012*

I’ll never regret the $20 tip that I left for my 6 dollar subway sandwich. I had had a very long day and was heading home after music practice at around 9:45. I still hadn’t gotten dinner that night and was very hungry. Not terribly satisfied with the fact that Subway was about my only option, I went through the door to wait in line behind two women, who were ordering sandwiches. There was a girl working by herself. I quickly realized that she was probably less satisfied that she was closing up Subway at 10 pm than I was with the fact that I would be eating there for dinner.

Of course, I was engulfed in my iPhone checking to see if Reggie Bush had somehow scored a touchdown, as it would have had (very minimal) effect on my fantasy football match. I was awoken back to reality by the question “what kind of cheese do you want?” I looked up to her eye contact and felt really stupid for looking down at my phone while this young lady was just trying to make me a sandwich, whilst making two other sandwiches. She looked very haggard but her eyes didn’t tell me that she was complaining about the fact that she had to work. Perhaps my claims to being intuitive about people are just excuses to let me judge them.

I’m sure that Subway isn’t the worst job ever, but I imagined that this girl was about my age. I’m sure it’s a fine job for when you’re trying to make your way through school or something, but at the age of 25 it seems like there are so many other opportunities people would want to be taking advantage of. I’m definitely not judging her this time, who knows where her life has lead her?

Anyways, I live my life on a sort of modified cash budget. I pay for my groceries, bills, and gas all on my card, but any food I want to eat out, drinks I want to buy, or fun I want to have, I use cash. I put a certain amount of money in my wallet every Monday and when there is no more money, I don’t do any more things. Sometimes I break the rules a bit and will buy Sunday brunch on my debit card, but I often have to turn down fun when I’m out of money. I actually only had about 30 dollars left in my wallet on this night and there were still a few days left in the week, but I felt like this girl could maybe use something to brighten her evening.

I asked her, “Are you the only one left here tonight?” She replied that she was. I then gestured to the empty tip jar and said, “So you get all the tips?” She sort of smiled, laughing that there was no money in there. So I dropped my 20 dollar bill in the tip jar and wished her a good rest of her night. She was so contritely astounded. You see, I don’t live in the nicest area of town and I’m not sure that people with a lot of money are frequenting the Subway restaurants near my house, though I’m open to being wrong.  She said how I didn’t have to do that and how it was so nice and said “wow” in between about every one of those sentences. I didn’t want to make it a big deal so I smiled, said I insisted, and quickly left.

I know that 20 bucks isn’t a huge deal. It’s a bigger deal to me than a lot of people with better jobs than I have, but even to me it’s really not a huge deal, at least in the grand scheme of my life. I’m not going to look back in five years and say, I really could have used that 20 bucks! Not having that $20 has made money a little tighter for me this week. It’s a Saturday as I write this and I’m already planning on how I have to stay home tonight since I’m out of money! I wasn’t expecting God to somehow give me extra money since I was diligent with what I was given. In fact, I’ve actually had a few unexpected expenses come up in the past few days. What I do know, is that for a few moments on Thursday night I was able to write a good story for my life. Do I wish that I had $20 to go spend tonight on drinks and having fun with friends? Absolutely. But I guarantee that when I look back on this week, I won’t regret the fact that I had to stay home on Saturday night in order to give a 350% tip on my buffalo chicken sandwich.