Holly's "Wayside Central" memories made me think of a funny story from my grad school days at CMU.
I didn't do my undergrad at Central, so I really didn't know anybody when I came to town. I spent most of my time hanging out with other the other grad students in my department. One night, after partaking in some alcoholic beverages, a small group of us were really hungry. We decided to go to "Tony's", a very tiny restaurant on Mission Street. Tony's is actually a chain around Michigan, though mostly in smaller towns. Their tag-line is "Home of the Giant Steak Sandwich," and when they say "Giant," they're really not exaggerating. My favorite thing at Tony's is the nachos. For about $5.00, a "small" order of nachos comes on a 12" pizza tray. It's piled about six inches high with anything and everything you can imagine... and they use real shredded cheese, not that toxic-orange glowing cheese sauce you get at the ballpark. Okay, I've gotten way off track with this story.
Anyway, about 5 or 6 of us headed over to Tony's. I don't really remember who was there. I'm pretty sure Matt was with us, other than him, I think it was a few other grad students whose names I've forgotten.
The Tony's in Mt. Pleasant is about the size of a single-wide trailer, with maybe 6 booths and a few tables, and they're open pretty late for all the drunk college kids. But when we got there, only one other person was in the whole place, a guy maybe about 50 years old or so. Remember, we were a little drunk, so we were a little loud and probably somewhat annoying to the only other diner. So we sit down at the table, order some pop (This is Michigan, so its not called "soda"), and like typical college kids, we start emptying out our pockets to see how much food we can afford. I think between 5 or 6 of us, we may have had about $12.00 total. Now, seven bucks can buy a lot of food at Tony's, but we'd all ordered drinks, and so we were a little concerned that some of us would have to starve. In the meantime, the guy at the other table got up, paid his bill, and left.
While we were still counting our pennies, the waiter walked over to us and said, "Did you know that guy who just left?" We all said no... and felt bad because we'd probably scared the poor guy out of the place.
Then the waiter says, "Oh, that's funny, 'cuz he just gave me five bucks and said it was to help cover your bill."
How cool is that? We never even got to say thanks. You gotta love small towns.