RSVP

So - I moved. I'll be talking more about that next week. In the meantime, I wanted to chat about something that's been on my mind for a while.

RSVP - Request for a response to an invitation (from French: répondez s'il vous plaît).

When people send an invitation, they usually need to know who is coming. You know, to plan food, seating, parking, entertainment, budget, etc. Sometimes a week is enough notice - sometimes it's not. Either way, if you receive an invitation that requests a response by a certain date, the polite thing to do is respond by that date. If you can't commit - then your answer is no. It is not the host's job to accommodate your unpredictable schedule.

I get multiple invites each week, primarily for events on Facebook. The other day, I received two in the mail.

Facebook events don't always have an RSVP date. But whether there is or there isn't, the process is the same:

Read the invite
Decide if I want to go
Check my calendar
     If it's open, I add the event and reply yes.
     If it's not, I reply no.

If the first event is something that can be moved, and the second one is important enough, I might make a change.

Either way, the whole process only takes about 5 minutes - 10 tops.

So there's really no good reason it should ever take weeks to reply to an event.

Unless you really don't want to go... in which case, you should just say no in the first place.