Over at LGM, Paul Campos found a Reddit post from a couple of servers who got huge tips last week ($300 and $777) from a patron who was expecting the rapture during the eclipse. Campos makes a good point:
Now if I walked into a restaurant, strung out from the road, and gave the servers more than a thousand dollars in tips because I believed space aliens were about to transport me to the planet Zod, where they don’t have money (or tacos apparently) I would be considered an obvious lunatic. But in this case the person in question is considered to be “part of the evangelical base” that could well re-elect Donald Trump president less than seven months from now.
But this is the part of the story I want to focus on:
Fast forward to today, and she’s back again, adamant that her tips were somehow fraudulent and that we tampered with them. Her claims of fraud are literally impossible, we bring the card reader to the table, and it’s the guest who decides the tip amount by either pressing a preset option or entering a custom one before hitting pay. That’s exactly what she did. So, it’s physically impossible for us to manipulate the tip amounts.
Both my coworker and I have already received our tips with our paychecks, and we obviously have to pay income tax on them. Returning the money to her at this point is literally impossible since we don’t actually have all the money.
[…]my manager told her we couldn’t refund the tip and she stormed out angrily to her Mercedes.[…]
Not only are we supposed to treat their crazy ideas as serious because they are “beliefs”, but they also want a fucking refund when their bullshit doesn’t pan out. And it’s never a lesson learned with these assholes — they’ll fall for the next con, because they were raised only to be comfortable when someone’s lying to them in the special way that the con men and women in their life have done since childhood.
