I’ll tip you but I won’t enjoy it

I had a weird encounter with a waitress this past weekend that I believe latently had to do with me being a bad tipper. When I heard that a colleague of mine had to create a script from scratch for the 48-hour film fest, I thought I’d try to create a short story for her that could be used in the script so that my bad encounter with this waitress could be immortalized on film.

“Wait, you don’t like to tip?” asked Nora when she overheard me saying something to that effect eight of nine years ago. Back when I lived in an esoteric Richmond neighborhood, I used to frequent a really good sandwich shop with a quirky vibe, a liquor license, sports TVs, and wifi several years ago in Richmond when I lived in that neighborhood. Nora was one of the wait staff members I had gotten to know well and occasionally we would even hang out on the porch after hours together. In other words, Nora became a Sam Malone to my Cliff and Norm or a Helen Hunt (sorry, I’m not going to look up her character name) to my Jack Nicholson in As Good as It Gets (hey, I’m a straight male, and she wasn’t without her charms).

I recently revisited this neighborhood in Richmond for the first time in five years and decided on my first day there to see if this sandwich shop was open. I fully expected the waiters to move on to other things and it was all about the food for me this time. Boasting that I used to be a regular in the early 2010s to the waitress, I found out Nora was still there after all these years as the manager.