You’re obviously not female Fingale. Get a grip, man, that’s far to simple; where’s the drama in actually knowing who is coming ?
Actually I configured the Evite to send out an automatic reminder 2 days before. It just would have been nice to be able to do some of the shopping last night.
And really, I’m not a fan of drama. I just thought the initial invite was very clear. There were columns for Yes, No, and Maybe, space to add additional notes, and boxes to indicate whether you are bringing a guest and what you are bringing for the potluck.
[slight hijack]
Larry Mudd – I can’t thank you enough. Just wandered over here to the pit, furious at my brother’s girlfriend who has a habit of deleting my emails, unread, before he can see them (especially when I’ve spent 1/2 the day tracking down and writing up stuff for him business-related; yes, we all loathe this woman, and no he won’t stand for any criticism of her, etc etc.)
At first when I saw
‘Kick it up a notch-- I suggest: FTLOGRSVP! OIKYA! OMFG!’
it was gibberish and it hit me all at once what it stood for…thanks for cheering me up!
[/slight hijack]
On the topic, my God, yes, it annoys the stuffing out of me when I’m trying to organise something, and have no clue if anyone plans to show up…
I got the For The Love Of God RSVP, and the ending. The bit I didn’t get was OIKYA - I assumed the ending was You Answer, but I don’t really know ?
I think people don’t want to commit to showing up at an event because they’re waiting to see if something more interesting comes along at the last minute. Horrible, but common.
That “Maybe” check-box on E-vites only encourages this sort of thinking, IMO. Might as well have a check-box that says “If I feel like it when the time comes.”
I thought OIKYA was “Or I’ll kill you all.”
OIKYA = “Or I’ll Kill Yer Ass”??
doh! “KICK Your Ass!”
heh
Short hijack: the verb that goes with RSVP is “to reservup” (at least according to Nanny Ogg in “Witches abroad” by Terry Pratchett.
And now back to our regularly scheduled thread.
I threw a baby shower a few weeks ago and I got a few RSVP’s before the ‘please reply by date’, a few the day of the shower, but many didn’t call at all. No one who didn’t call showed up, though. I assume that if people don’t call, they aren’t coming. As rude as it is to not reply at all, it is even ruder to not reply and still show up!
I think a lot of people only call if they are coming, thinking RSVP means the opposite of ‘regrets only?’ People don’t seem to call if they are not coming but usually call if they are, IME.
Either way it’s annoying.
Evites in my experience tend to get ignored or lost in the swamp of junk mail that people receive and delete without further thought, especially since now a lot of the spam mail is being sent with “innocuous” looking subject lines. I’ve actually taken to putting NOT SPAM in email messages being sent to lists as a hedge against this. And I now almost never use Evites for my own invitations.
Eva Luna, you know what we went through with the wedding. And at the end of the day, we had one person show up who never RSVP’d, and ten people who did RSVP who never showed up. (The latter was what actually bothered me more, since we paid for food those people never ate and for the use of a facility they never set foot in. But that’s another rant.)
When we bought our wedding invites a couple years back, the planner specifically told us not to get invites with ‘RSVP’ on them as people have, for some reason, grown a tendency to ignore it. Instead we were directed to get ones with something like, “the favor of a reply is requested” or some other such nonsense. It turned out pretty well considering, we had about 85% of people who got them respond, and most of the ones that didn’t were people in the wedding party or their families, so we assumed they’d be there.
Just a note. I hate everyone, so I don’t tend to get annoyed at all the discurteous things the ignoramuses do.
I just assumed they were trying to lure us by providing really swell vaginas. In light of the truth I’m now wondering if some of my previous inquiries about the lack thereof wern’t somewhat inappropriate.
With an RSVP, no response = not coming period. Sorry I didn’t get your reply, we have only got food for the 6 who did reply and they are allready here. Buy, see you next time.
Often a second request for RSVP to those who havn’t replied yet is worthwhile if your numbers are low, or your friends are hopeless.
If the arrangements include complicated cooking for a set number of people, I check a day before with all those who have said they will come. If the arrangements are more flexible, you can always double check with those who said they couldn’t make it to improve the numbers.
In Russia, HOST replies to YOU!
Now that is a good idea!
(Doesn’t stop the last-minute putzes from calling an hour before and asking “oh, what’s your address”, but it sure must help quite a bit. I must remember that.
According to Peppermint Patty, RSVP means “Revised Standard Version, Please”.
I recently had the opposite problem – ran into some of the people I was planning to invite, told them about the party, they said “Oh yeah, that sounds like fun, I’ll be there with bells on, be sure to send me an invite with directions” – and then a bunch of the clods didn’t show up. This was also a potluck party, but we had enough beverages, plates, etc. for three times the number of people who actually showed, and I had spent a lot of time shoveling out the house to make room for all those people (it was supposed to be an outdoor party, but the weather turned cold). Plus the disappointment of “Oh, So-and-so’s coming!” and then So-and-so didn’t show up. No follow-up calls to apologize or anything either.
Bastards.
Isn’t it a pot luck? That’s the beauty of pot lucks, for me anyway. Tell everyone to bring food. Fewer people = less food. More people = more food.
Also I find if you assign food - specifically tell someone to bring appetiser, someone else to bring soup, someone else to bring hummous, someone else to bring dessert etc - then they’ll feel a kind of obligation if they don’t. If I don’t do this I just end up with piles and piles of hummous. But maybe that’s just my friends …
I got an e-mail invite the other day that had this at the bottom:
“If you can come to Staci’s baby shower, please RSVP to me.”
I don’t think the sender of the e-mail knew what RSVP meant …
I sent back an e-mail reply stating that I would NOT make it to the shower.
I considered adding a snarky lecture about what RSVP meant, but I stayed my fingers.
Too bad … 'coz I do snarky real well!