Six Drafts of a Gentle Field Trip Money Reminder and One Foghorn

It is 9:12pm on a Wednesday, and I am about to send a message to fourteen families about $18.

I want to be clear about the scale of this operation. Fourteen families. Eighteen dollars. The pumpkin farm field trip is in nine days. And I have been staring at a blank text box since the dishwasher finished, which is the longest I have stared at anything that wasn't a spreadsheet.

Draft one, in which I become a bailiff

"REMINDER: Payment of $18 for the field trip is now OVERDUE. Please remit immediately."

I read it back and heard a man in a gray suit knocking on a screen door. I said "remit" out loud, to my own kitchen, and the dog left the room.

Delete.

Draft two, which circles like a very polite vulture

"Just circling back on the pumpkin farm money!"

Circling back. As if the $18 is a small plane and I am air traffic control, calmly noting that it has been in the pattern since September 30th. Nobody has ever read "just circling back" and felt warm. They felt the shadow of the wings.

Delete.

Draft three, with the exclamation marks doing a lot of heavy lifting

"No worries at all if you haven't had a chance!!! Totally fine!!! :)"

Three exclamation points is not "no worries." Three exclamation points is a person holding a smile on with both hands. My sister-in-law once sent me a "No worries!!!" and I paid her within four minutes, in a cold sweat, for a thing I did not owe her.

Delete.

Draft four, the one that got emotional

I'm not going to quote it. It was 340 words long and it contained the phrase "as a community." I closed the laptop. I opened the fridge. I closed the fridge. The fridge had nothing to add.

Here is the actual problem, and I think every treasurer knows it in their bones, no class fund guide required: the family who hasn't paid is not a villain. Last month it was us. We were one of the fourteen. Our $18 sat in a tab I never closed for nineteen days, because the dryer died and a car needed a new battery and the Venmo app wanted me to log in again. Nobody was cruel to me about it. Which is exactly why I remember it so well.

So the reminder has two jobs that fight each other: be unmissable, and be un-embarrassing.

A brief word on foghorns

I assume lighthouse keepers had a whole philosophy about this. The foghorn does not send a "gentle reminder." It makes the same sound, every thirty seconds, in the same flat tone, and no ship's captain has ever taken it personally. Nobody thinks the foghorn is mad at them. Nobody replies "so sorry!!" to the foghorn.

The reminder isn't the insult. The variation is. The moment it's slightly warmer one week and slightly colder the next, people start reading tone into it like tea leaves.

Anyway. Back to my text box.

Drafts five and six, which are the same draft

Draft five was warm, specific, and about nine lines. Draft six was draft five with eight lines taken out, because a message you have to scroll is a message nobody finishes.

Here is what I sent at 9:41pm:

"Hi all! Pumpkin farm is $18 per family, Venmo link below, anytime this week works. Pinning it so it doesn't drown in the chat. Thank you!"

One exclamation point per sentence, max. A date, an amount, a link, no adjectives about anybody's character. It reads like a friend leaning over a fence.

How it ended, which was not with a moral

Yeah, at some point I got tired enough of rewriting this text that I let an app send the reminders instead (in ClassKasa that's a Premium thing). Same words, same tone, same time, a plain link, no downloads (yes, really, it's in the FAQ), nobody's feelings in the loop, including mine. The foghorn approach. Strongly recommend, but I know I'm biased.

By 9:50pm, two families had paid. By 10:30pm, one thumbs-up under my message, from a parent who did not pay but wanted me to know they saw it, which I am choosing to count as progress.

The other eleven, I assume, are asleep. I am not. I'm writing draft seven, just in case.