An anonymous man going by the name of "Mike" has given a waitress at a Times Square restaurant a whopping $3,000 tip on a $43.50 bill.
Both the generous tipper and the waitress remain anonymous, but the waitress contacted the ReesSpecht Life foundation to thank the founders and their little son for inspiring Mike.
The receipt for the bill, which was uploaded on ReesSpecht Life's Facebook page, shows Mike wrote the waitress a little note on the back about why he decided to tip her almost 7,000 percent of the cost of his meal.
"Thank you for your kindness and humility," Mike tells the waitress. "My teacher in middle school had such a difficult experience a few years ago which has sparked me to do this."
Mike then tells her to visit ReesSpectLife.com, a pay-it-forward movement started by Richard Specht, Mike's middle school science teacher, and his wife Samantha, in return for the kindness and support shown to them by the numerous people in their community when their 22-month-old son, Richard Edwin-Ehmer Specht, affectionately called Rees, died in a drowning accident just two days before Hurricane Katrina hit the eastern U.S.
"We went through the storm and lost our power for two weeks and it was a nightmare on top of a nightmare," says Specht in an interview with Yahoo. "We had people coming from all over to help us - a landscaping company came and redid our yard and wouldn't take any payment from us, friends and family brought food and wouldn't let us pay them back. So we decided to pay people back anonymously. If we couldn't pay it back we'd pay it forward."
Mike, a Broadway artist, tells ABC that the waitress had been serving him for almost a year now. Despite having problems paying her costly rent in Manhattan, the waitress never missed any of Mike's shows.
"She's a lovely individual and she talked about how she was served an eviction notice last month," says Mike. "I just had also been thinking about for quite some time my teacher's project and this foundation and I thought it was an appropriate time."
The $3,000 tip will not likely last long in Manhattan where rent fees are exorbitant, but the anonymous waitress promised to keep the chain of positivity going and pay it forward.
The Spechts started their foundation by distributing 5,000 business cards encouraging people to pay it forward. To date, they have distributed 100,000 cards all over the world, but it is likely that more people have done anonymous acts of kindness inspired by their son.
"The first one I ever gave out, at the Dunkin' Donuts near my house, I got a message from the girl who worked the drive-thru that night saying that every car paid for the car behind them until the morning rush was over," Specht says. "So that was one card and a lot of amazing acts. I want to make the world a kinder place."
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