here's your tip

Yesterday at school I had a request for a weave. Heather, an instructor at my school, got her hair done by me about a month ago and since then has had 2 family members come in to have me to their hair. Anyways, so I come back from lunch and see this lady with hair almost to her butt and re-growth that was about 6 inches. Definitely not looking forward to this weave, who knows how long it's going to take me! So I bring her back to my station and ask what she is wanting. She says that she wants to be really blonde like she was before she got married. Easy enough, just do a partial weave with bleach. Well I get started, not realizing how much hair she actually has on her head plus how long it was. About half way through she tells me some pretty sad things she has been going through for the past 4 or 5 years. I really felt bad for her with her going through a divorce and not having much. After 3 hours we got done and it looked AMAZING! I wish i would have taken pictures for everyone to see how big of a difference it made. So I dried and straightened her hair, showed her the products I used, and found Heather and left her up to pay. I went back to my seat and started cleaning up so I could do some book work and she is tapping on my shoulder. I turn around to see her holding a one dollar bill and she was handing it to me. I took the dollar and thanked her without seeming disappointed. I mean, most of the time when you do a weave you expect a little more then one dollar as your tip. I put it in my purse and went back to what I was doing. The girls at the front asked if I got tipped and I told them I got one dollar and they were laughing and asked if I was mad. I told them that I totally understood that she didn't have much and she has gone through a lot and so if all she had was one dollar to give then I would be fine with that. They laughed and threw out 4 more dollars making it a total of $5. They told me it was my money, but by then I was mad at them for lying to me so I wouldn't even go grab it right away. I just held onto my one dollar bill. I guess Bree decided she had tortured me enough and yelled out, 

SHE GAVE YOU $50!

 I was in shock! I started laughing and didn't even know how to react! I saw her again about 20 minutes later and everyone was laughing! I said thank you about a million times and the look on her face totally made my day! Even without all the money, just to see this women happy for the first time in who knows how long was reward enough for me. She finally felt beautiful and was ready to go out and meet new people and felt like she wanted to actually get out again! Not saying that I don't absolutely love that I got a $50 tip on saturday, but I was not expecting anything. I'm not sure what got into me cause normally I would have been so disappointed, I guess just for that 3 hours I was really thinking about someone else and everything they were going through and so thankful for what I had!