I made an online donation to a local charity recently and received an effusively grateful letter from the executive director, which made me very nervous.
How much did I donate? I was pretty sure it was about $200 — it’s a good organization that does effective work in my area, so I was feeling generous. But I was feeling up-to-$200 generous, and when I read the note from the director, I suddenly felt queasy. “Dear Mr. Long: We cannot thank you enough for your recent very generous gift. Your vote of confidence in the important work we do is gratifying and encouraging, and we thank you for partnering with us in this important mission.” That’s a lot of nice words for a $200 donation, I thought. I wondered if I added an extra zero by mistake.
That could have happened, to be honest. I have been known to tackle my monthly bill-paying and general settling-up in the quiet of the evening over a nice glass (or glasses) of wine (and sometimes bourbon) so by the time I’ve dispatched my obligations to American Express and VISA and the local utilities and reached the discretionary part of the pile, who knows how flushed with generosity and good cheer I am. I have learned the hard way to avoid online shopping during what I euphemistically call my “evening me time.” When the UPS guy delivers a $470 Japanese gadget from some website that makes crystal-clear ice cubes, and you have no idea when you ordered it, you take precautionary measures. But this was the first time I wondered if I somehow sipped my way toward overly extravagant generosity.
Finding out how much, exactly, I donated was a hard thing to pin down. The thank you letter was infuriatingly vague about the actual amount. Maybe because people convert that imprecision into a larger deduction on their taxes, or because it’s a form letter and they just hit “mail merge” and “print” and out it goes, or maybe (and this is my thinking) I’m not the only one who gets expansive and philanthropic after a few belts, and they want to acknowledge the gift without alarming the giver.
Plus, it was an embarrassing situation. I thought to myself, do I call the director of development and say something like, Hey, just going over accounts with my financial adviser here, and it was two, 200, right? Hundred? Or do I immediately come clean and tell them that I was thrilled to offer them a $200 donation — tipsy or sober, it’s a great organization — but any amount more than that is out of my budget, and with reckless giving like that it’s likely I’ll end up as one of the souls the organization is trying to help rather than someone it counts on for support.
Because both of those solutions required a certain amount of courageous honesty, I chose another path. I went online to look at my credit card account, and there, plain as day, was a $200 charge to the organization. After a sigh of relief, I went through my stack of monthly bills and removed all the possible charitable donations, wrapping them up together with a couple of thick rubber bands. That, I thought to myself, should do the trick.
This month, however, there was another charge from the same charity — $200, again — and I realized that I had somehow toggled the switch on the donation page that said “recurring” and that this was going to keep happening every month. My $200 yearly gift had become, through the mists of a couple of Maker’s Marks on the rocks, a $2400 Founder’s Circle commitment, which entitled me to my name in the program for the annual gala and a coffee mug. Oh, and an effusive note from the executive director, which now made painful sense.
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The thing to do was this: call the organization, explain the misunderstanding, apologize for being unable to make a monthly gift of $200, and promise to remember the organization in my will, which, now that I’m 60 years old, isn’t such an outlandish promise.
But because that solution requires a certain amount of courageous honesty, I chose another path. I simply canceled the credit card I used. Next month, when the charge doesn’t go through, the organization will discover that the card is inactive, and they will probably send me a note about it, but that note will be at the bottom of the tightly wrapped brick of notes that I have already taught myself to ignore during my monthly bill-paying sessions, accompanied by bourbon and crystal-clear ice.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.