If I could go back and change any point in my life, I would go back to the moment I decided to take a tip when I was young. It was at least 6 years ago on a early saturday morning; The outside air was clear and brisk, and the birds were quiet. My mom used to own a dance studio with a friend of hers from college. Her studio was called “The Dance XChange”, and they had been running it together for years now. They had been good enough to win a lot of trophies and prizes from their dancing skills and from competitions.
Every year my mom would go to a dance recital, which is kind-of like a dance competition but I have no idea what the difference is. Since it took a long time for the dancers to do their thing, there would always be concessions during the different performances. I was around 9 years old when my mom decided that it would be a good idea to let me sell concessions to people. These recitals usually lasted a good fraction of the day, about 10:00am-3:00pm or 4:00pm, and there was always a lot of dancing (as you may have guessed). I do not fully remember what the place looked like, but I do remember it was a school with a lot of hallways.
Before we started concessions, I had my friend there, Jacob. Jacob and I did a lot of wandering around the school, even though we weren’t supposed to. We didn’t know what else to do so we walked around and opened people’s lockers and stole their pencils; I don’t know why but we thought it was really funny. We hung around with some other older kids, and they were talking about some pretty bad things for being middleschoolers, not even I said some of the things they said in middle school and I was a little obsessed with swearing at the time because I thought it was cool to do that.
Getting back to the main story, Jacob and I decided to keep wandering around the school. Jacob was a kind of mechanical type you could say, he saw things and he could figure out how they worked. Jacob and I found a soda machine and we were thirsty from all the walking around we did. Jacob found out how to open the machine and got out a paperclip and opened the machine so that we could have some pop to quench our thirst. We had a couple of pops before we decided to head back to the main area where the dancing was.
Jacob was also a hip-hop dancer and he had to go on stage soon, so he left to practice. I was a little lonely then and i didn’t want to go back and talk to those other kids, so I pulled out my Nintendo DS and started to play my pokemon. I was just sitting in the hallway re-beating the final bosses of the game for the millionth time, and my mom came over and asked me if I wanted to go and help selling concessions. I was very excited to have my first non-official job, this was obviously when I thought jobs were really cool and was jealous of everyone who had one.
This is quite the opposite now that I have a real job. So since I had nothing better to do, I agreed and walked along with my mom to the concessions tables that we had set up. I started out sitting there and watching some of the other people that they asked to help. This mostly contained of parents that had nothing to do until their daughter or son was about to perform. I don’t remember if the recital was a sit down and watch kind of thing, or a casual kind of competition. Eventually, they let me help out and I started handing out cookies and punch.
A while went by and I got a lot of orders for many different types of cookies. We had M&M, chocolate, and sugar cookies. So I got pretty good at handing out cookies and punch and also collecting money into the “register” which the people called it. Although it was really just a metal box. It got really busy and many of the staff were impressed because this little 9 year old kid was doing a better job than them at keeping up with the flow of customers (don’t ask me how, I don’t know).
I was about to go to the next customer when the old man that I had just finished with handed me an extra dollar, and I said “What would you like for this dollar? ” “Nothing, that is for you to keep for doing such a good job. ” He said. And I stood there for a second and said “What do you mean this is for me” “Go ahead young man, put that in your pocket, it’s a tip” he said. “OK, I guess, thank you sir” I said. Now at this very moment, the moment i took that dollar bill, I thought it would (for some reason) be ok to take a small “tip” from each payment for the cookies and juice.
So I had collected and collected, tip upon tip. I did this until I had full pockets of change and paper money pretty much falling out of my pockets. No one noticed at all until we were about to leave. I was acting really nervous in front of my parents for some reason, and my dad could tell from the softball sized clumps of change in my cargo pants, that I had taken money that didn’t belong to me. As I unloaded all of the money into my dads cupped hands, my mom was laughing her ass off in the background.
I told them about the man that game me the tip and how I got that I can take a tip from everyone is still unknown to me but it all worked out in the end. Except for me, who was forced to give up what I later found out was almost $50 of change (which is a lot considering that cookies and juice were a dollar a piece). I wish I wouldn’t have taken the money, or at the very least I wish I wouldn’t have been caught with the money so that I could keep it.
