Today was a long day. I opened the store this morning and I closed the store this evening. Good times. Thankfully I had a six hour break in the middle so I was able to have a nice long lunch with Joel and take a much needed nap. Instead of giving you the run down of my entire day I’ll just give you the moments that stood out.

– We have a tip jar at work. Some people drop the extra change in, some people leave a whole dollar. More often than not people don’t leave anything at all. It’s whatever. I don’t really judge you if you don’t leave a tip. Obviously I like you more if you do but like I said, whatever. Your pennies and nickles don’t make or break my day. We have several regulars though and one of them is a really nice, retired guy that comes in most days and does his crossword while he has his coffee. We’ve had several nice conversations and never have I noticed whether he left a tip or not. Until today.

For some reason, after he paid for his coffee and I handed him his 18 cents he felt the need to explain himself. His words were

“I would leave you this as a tip but I have a jar at home that I’m saving my change in. It’s about the size of your tip jar but it’s full of quarters. It probably has $1,000. I’m saving for a vacation.”

My outward response was “Oh, how nice.” What I was thinking though was “Um, good for you?” I tweeted as much.

The thing is, like I said, I don’t care that much if you tip me. Whatever, it’s your money. However, if you don’t tip me I’d like to think it’s because you didn’t think it was necessary. Don’t tell me that you specifically considered giving me a tip, thought about it and decided you were better off with your 18 cents than I am. Then you just look greedy.

-Joel and I had lunch together at an amazing Chinese buffet near our apartment. We sat next to a couple tables where what appeared to be a class of high school students were sitting. There were probably 10 students and 2 teachers at the table and they were discussing trying new food and some kind of study questions etc. Things you’d expect to hear from a field trip. I only caught snippets of their conversation and wasn’t paying much attention until I heard the teacher say,

“No, I don’t got a pen.”

And then I died a little inside. Oh god, our educational system is so broken even the teachers can’t speak proper English. I visibly cringed. Thank goodness not a moment later I heard her say,

“But I might have a pen.”

She was correcting a students grammar by being snarky. And then all was back to being right with the world. It probably shouldn’t have mattered that much to me, but it did.

And now I’m planning to sleep as long as possible. Even after taking the nap I could have slept hours and hours ago. Hanging out with my coworkers was totally worth it though. It’s such a rare thing to enjoy all the people’s company that you work with as much as I do. I’m a lucky girl and I definitely know it.