Bartender Gets $17.5K Tip

Customer told her to keep winning lottery ticket
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Oct 7, 2013 2:04 AM CDT
Bartender Gets $17,505 Tip
Kephart took the weekend off after the big win but plans to return to work today.   (Shutterstock)

After hours of fruitlessly searching for an affordable couch last week, Oregon bartender Aurora Kephart's day picked up when she went to work and got an amazing $17,505 tip. A regular customer asked her to pick two from his handful of unplayed Keno lottery tickets, the first of which won $5 and the second of which won the big prize, Kephart, who has worked at Conway's Restaurant and Lounge in Springfield for nearly four years, tells the Register-Guard.

She tried to give the ticket back to the customer, but "he had me sign it so nobody could steal it," Kephart tells ABC News. "Then he said, 'Now that you've signed it, you're the only person who could cash it.'" The 25-year-old says that when she cashed in the tickets, she insisted the customer take a percentage of the cash. "I forced him to take it," she says. She has given some of her winnings to a muscular dystrophy charity but says she plans to save the rest—minus the cost of a new couch. (In other recent lottery news: The latest Powerball winner owes his millions to his wife's craving for hot dogs.)

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