"Is a Dollar Cool?"

"Is a dollar cool?"

I was faced with that question 8 days ago at Conway Trucking around 5:30 pm, after brilliantly navigating Hilliard rush hour traffic, waiting 3 minutes for the guy to come out, and persevering through the aftermath of a violent snowstorm in the preceding 48 hours, which was essentially an area-wide skating rink.

Before I could muster out a seemingly graceful answer to a horribly dumb question, the trucker's coworkers heckled this cheapskate mercilessly over his tipping habits:
"A dollar, he drove all this way and waited for your a--!"
"Come on man, a dollar???"
"What is this, 1975?"

Okay, I threw that last one in myself. During all this, I kept a smile on my face and let the heckling truckers say what I wanted to say, despite the fact that Conway Trucking is on the very edge of our delivery map. To my surprise, the penny pinching trucker held firm and wrote $1 on the tip line on the credit card slip. Joy.

Fast forward 1 week:

I check my tickets and see that I have a stop to Conway Trucking. I get to said destination and inform the multitasking dispatchers who my customer is and have him paged. After 2 minutes, my customer comes out and greets me by saying "is a dollar cool?" I immediately recognize him as one of the hecklers from last week, and I share a good laugh with him before giving him his total, $18.60. He hands me a 20 and a 10 and says "this is to make up for that cheap bas---- last week". I said "Sir, you don't have to do that, but I greatly appreciate it."