Impatience Is Expensive

I am probably one of the most impatient people in the world. One of my pet peeves is figuring out what everyone owes at the end of meal or at a bar. I usually like to get separate checks to avoid that situation, but it's no possible in some cases.

This past Saturday night, I went out with my bf and a pretty large group of his friends in order to celebrate his birthday. Dinner was relatively cheap and the group was smaller, so paying there wasn't a problem. We met up with a very large group of people at a bar afterward. With that large a group and in that setting where people are just kind of all over, it wasn't possible to get a separate check or even keep track of who had what.

Long story short, the easiest thing to do was for my to charge the entire bill and have people pay me what they think they owe. Yes, I realize that I'm not very likely to get paid back exactly what I'm owed, but it would have taken at least an hour to sort the bill out. I'm okay with that. So, I charged the full $836.15 (which included an 18% tip) and people threw money at me like I was a stripper. I got about $530 because not everyone had cash. They all seemed very good about it and people came up to me and said that they still owe me more or that they'll get a check to me next time they see me.

I think that it worked out rather well because we weren't there forever figuring out who owes what. And I may lose some money, but it saved me the headache of the alternative. And I actually got more cash than I expected right then. I figure if my portion of the bill was $100 and my bf's was about $100, then it worked out just fine.

And it will actually be interesting to see who follows through with giving me more money like they said they would. These are my bf's friends, so I don't really know quite a few of them.

Does anyone else end up paying because they're too impatient to deal with sorting a bill out among a group of people?