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The Mental Reply

A while back, the Mild Fiancée and I decided to have a joint birthday party. We'd never really done that before, but it seemed like a fun way to get our friends together. Some of these folks have already met each other, so it just seemed like a fun day. Well, as many of these posts have proven, things don't always go as planned.

It's worth mentioning that the people we wanted to invite were people we hang out with on a semi-regular basis. And since we conceived of this idea well in advance, we mentioned it to a few of them. We even had the date picked out, so we gave them a heads up before actually sending out the invitation.

Generally speaking, our friends were all in favor of this, and several verbally committed to being there. All in all, we were quite happy with the reception to this idea, and we started mentally preparing for throwing said party.

Now, we probably could have sent out the invitation farther in advance. But since we'd already gotten some verbal acceptances, we figured it wasn't that big a deal. After all, it was more of a formality at that point than anything else. A non-trivial number of people had already said they could make it on that date. We just needed an exact count to try to gauge how much food and drink to stock.

Yet, as the days went by, we started to see some surprising replies. A few folks had other commitments, and they couldn't make it. Others were tentative, and a few others simply didn't reply. By the time the week of the date rolled around, no one had actually replied that they'd be there. Well, crap.

We were bummed, but we took it in stride. Stuff happens, and if people are busy, they're busy. So, we canceled the party and sent out a notification. And THAT'S when the hilarity started happening. We got the following responses after we'd canceled the shindig:

  • "Wait, did you hit the wrong button on the Evite? I just got a notification that it's canceled."
    Nope, that was intentional. We didn't feel like having a party by ourselves, so we called it off. Apparently, this person was all set to come, and had forgotten to reply to the invitation. Oops.
  • "Oh, we mentally committed to going since we'd talked about it, but I think we forgot to reply."
    Fun fact: this was the follow up comment to the previous exchange, so it was the same folks. We all had a good laugh about it, and it's actually become a bit of a running gag at this point. We may or may not tell each other when we've mentally committed to doing something, too.
  • "Wait, what happened? I was coming."
    You were? That was news to us. I think we got several variations of this over text message or email, so it turned out we actually would have had enough guests to hold a shindig, after all. The Mild Fiancée's response to this cracked me up: it involved the use of telepathy.
All in all, we had a good laugh about the whole thing. And don't feel bad for us, we ended up getting together with some good friends a couple of times. They were super sweet, and insisted that we have cake and presents. It all turned out well in the end, but in the future, we're going to have to keep an eye out for those mental RSVP's.
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