The Tip Jar

Whenever a restaurant has a tip jar at the counter, I put something in it. I’m not noble or generous. I just want the only contents of my meal to be "food".

And to that end I always want the cashier to observe my "generosity". The hard part of that is making sure that he sees the dollar drop into the tip jar without making an obvious show of it. I have been known to flutter the dollar over the open maw of the tip jar for a few seconds to ensure that the cashier sees it in his peripheral vision while he pulls my change out of the cash register.

It would be nice to hear a "thank you" when I do that, just so that I can eat my meal with confidence. But sometimes cashiers are as stingy with expressions of gratitude as I am generous (in a coerced kind of way) with my tips.

Today, at lunch, I fluttered my dollar and dropped it. Then the cashier counted out my ten-dollars in change. He gave me a five-dollar bill and five ones. I had seen his change drawer. It had ten-dollar bills. That was a pretty clear suggestion that one or more of those dollars belonged in the tip jar. Failure.

I considered tipping twice – once when he could see it. Jesus said to do your good works in private, where they can be seen by God, not to be praised by man. That doesn’t apply to tipping. In tipping, philosophers rightly might ask, "If a tip falls into the tip jar and the cashier doesn’t see it, does the tip exist?" It’s a matter of perspective.

I considered the possibility that he was manipulating me into over-tipping. But I could see his focus while drawing my change. It was like Jack Bauer defusing an atomic bomb. I should have fluttered longer.

Years ago, I ate at a restaurant and left the tip on the table. Then I paid and left. As I left, the big guy in the next booth had his arm over the seat, toward my table. His arm hovered there as I passed. When I came back to the restaurant on another day, the waitress, the same one that served me before, said "You came back", as if that were a surprise. The guy in the next booth probably got my two dollars. I probably got foreign bio-mass between my burger and bun.

Something like this has happened more than once. So now I always leave the tip when the server is in sight of the table. Sometimes, I even put the tip into his or her hand. Why take a chance?

Back in college, I ate at a restaurant, but I didn’t have small bills for a tip. So I paid at the cashier, and then I returned to the table to leave a tip. But the waitress had already come to the table to collect the tip, and she looked crestfallen to see that there was none. Of course I fixed that.

Some days later, at another restaurant, I ate with my friend Bob. I was telling him that story. Just as I got to the point that I said, "And the waitress looked so hurt", our waitress came to the table to take our orders. Her facial muscles drew her features into the center of her face.

I ordered a turkey avocado sandwich. Bob ordered spaghetti. My avocado slices were rock hard. Bob’s spaghetti sauce was cold. When we complained to the waitress, a police officer from another table came over and asked us, in an accusing way, whether we had a problem. Bless him. The streets of Riverside were safe, so he could spare time to intimidate college students being poorly served at a restaurant. We left a decent tip.

I guess that the moral of the story is this: you can try to do right by God and man, but, against every effort, your good works might be performed in secret.