A house divided

[muckefuck]

So far, the chief lesson from the problems spawned by the change in how my Mom's family is handling their annual Christmas dinner is that we have a digital gap between the generations and it's only getting wider.

Over the years, it's gone from a big gathering a my grandparents' house to a travelling party hosted by each of their children in turn. Many years ago now, it made the leap from private residences to public halls and, as the guest list grew longer, Mom's siblings began pairing up in order to spread the expense. Now this year they're introducing a pay-as-you-go model. To secure a spot, you were supposed to mail a cheque to my eldest aunt last week.

I don't actually have any personal cheques any more. monshu pays most of the bills from a joint account and then I reimburse him via account transfer. My own bills, I pay online; on the rare occasions when I can't, the creditor will generally take a credit card over the phone. The last time I can remember needing to pay a private individual a sum that was inconvenient to carry around was when I had to reimburse Nuphy for my portion of the opera subscription. For that, I took advantage of a feature recently added to my chequing account which allows me to disburse funds to anyone with a valid e-mail address.

There were no e-mail addresses listed on the (paper) invitation, but I have one for one of the two contacts given. However, as she wasn't the aunt whose job it was to collect the cheques, I e-mailed first to ask if she had an address for her older sister. She got back to me (three days later) to let me know that our eldest aunt doesn't have a computer. Instead I'm literally using Dark Ages technology to pay her: My mother will go over there today, cash in hand[*], and I will repay her in cash when I see her next.

This comes on the heels of an ugly blowup shortly after the financial changes were announced. As far as I can tell, no one in my generation was consulted. Rather than inform us of what was being discussed, our mother's plan was to intercept the invitations and pay for us. But they got through[**] and my sister, surprised and dismayed, did what she reflexively does in these situations: She turned to her peer group for a dose of perspective. And, naturally, she did so online, via a Facebook post.

Before long, this got back to one of the organisers (obviously one who has a computer, as well as a Facebook account) and she basically blew a gasket. How dare my sister (who she all but called an ungrateful brat[***]) talk about a family matter in front of outsiders. Nevermind that my sister wasn't directly criticising the change, just pointing out that she was uncomfortable with the expense and wondering what others had done in similar circumstances. If she'd had concerns, she should've taken them to "someone within the family".

[There will be a brief pause for everyone to appreciate the irony of that.]

At some point during the exchange, our aunt had to consult with one of her daughters to determine that, yes, the whole conversation was publicly visible to any of my sister's Friends. In response to her concerns, Sis deleted the conversation and resigned herself to being "talked about at Thanksgiving". It's going to be interesting to see what the fallout from this is like at the party itself.


* She doesn't have any personal cheques either, but not because she doesn't use them. Rather she put off reordering until she'd already run out of them.
** Or at least some did. Despite the fact that I've been at the same address for over four years and my aunt asked for it again only a year ago when a wedding invite bounced, mine was once again misdirected and had to be resent.
*** She went on to point out that she was paying her offsprings' way, and that perhaps our Mom would do the same. And to mention that there was a "silent benefactor" willing to subsidise those who would be otherwise unable to come--as if there were any member of our extended family who wouldn't rather swallow hot coals than hit up a relative for the money to go to a festive dinner.

Comments

[lhn.livejournal.com]

Chase's e-pay will generate and mail a check if I put in a recipient's name and address. (Which makes it cheaper than handwriting a check, since they don't charge for the postage.) Any chance your bank does something similar?

I think I may be on the far side of the generation gap when it comes to discussing private matters on a public Facebook post. :-)

(Insofar as it exists in our family-- my mom's the one who made me sign up for Facebook, and you have to go up to my nonagenarian grandmother to find someone without email. Even my technophobic father-in-law has an iPhone now.)

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I think calling them "private matters" is something of an exercise in question-begging. Is charging for a family dinner some kind of shameful secret? Should no one post any pictures or comments on who attended or what was served in order to maintain the "privacy" of an event not open to the public?

[lhn.livejournal.com]

If I wouldn't have the conversation in front of someone, I generally try not to post it publicly. (Or the near-equivalent, like the Facebook "Friends" list for most people.)

So "this thing this person did created problems for me" would either go to that person if I actually have something I want to work out with them, or to a limited list that they're not part of and with which there's unlikely to be overlap (and that I generally trust not to shout from the rooftops) if I just want to vent or talk out the issue.¹

As the informal barriers to information dissemination dissolve (there were never really any technical ones) I'm increasingly reticent about the latter. I'm more likely to ask myself if I could live with anything's winding up in the worst possible recipient's inbox or, as my dad likes to say, on the front page of the New York Times.

(Which is frustrating, because I'm crap at face-to-face conversation about anything remotely stress-inducing or controversial, so text is a preferable way of dealing with it, if all things were equal.)

¹In practice, this only applies to people I know, since I'm evidently willing to say unkind things about acts of political figures or work by artists that I wouldn't likely say directly. But if the person is a known participant in a forum or I otherwise discover that they're reading it, then it definitely does apply.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I try to follow the same principle. I don't ever want someone to find out via social media that I'm annoyed with them over something that happened offline. If I need to vent about people, I try to do it in fora where the majority of participants are privy to neither their identity nor mine. More often, however, I just bitch to the Old Man. (Though that's not perfect either, because it can be awkward when something I've said in anger ends up colouring his opinion of that person ever after.)

But I saw this incident a little differently. Before my sister raises potentially tricky issues with somebody, she likes to get feedback to make sure that her assumptions are reasonable and her perceptions aren't distorted. I've never seen my aunts comment on her feed before, so I can see how she might conclude that they wouldn't see the discussion before she had a chance to speak to them directly about her concerns.

[bunj.livejournal.com]

I can sympathize with both sides of that Facebook conversation: Sis was understandably upset (I thought the pricing structure was awfully wonky, who charges $9 for a 3 year-old's dinner?), but I can also see Aunt's position: she was airing grievances publicly before talking with family members about it. Sure, she was just getting feedback, but it could easily be (and was) interpreted as an affront. It's a reminder to everyone that Facebook does not discriminate among Friends, and makes me once again appreciate the fig leaf of anonymity that LJ provides.

Oh, and Mom probably didn't use Dark Age technology to deliver the funds, unless she took the donkey cart instead of a car. Just early twentieth century technology.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Perhaps I should've said "Dark Ages method". I was conceiving of it as "personal courier carrying cash" without getting hung up on the mode of transportation.

Yeah, I can see both sides of the disagreement as well, but you really should've seen how over the top the response was. The cracks about her ingratitude went beyond the pale. Moreover, they laid bare the assumption that none of us had made any material contributions during those times when Mom was responsible for hosting. We've been "paying our own way", as it were, for years now--and why not, seeing as we're all adults?

That's another faultline here, a purely generational one not readily ascribable to technological change. The fact that the aunts and uncles didn't feel there a need to consult with any of our generation before they changed everything around (despite the fact that we outnumber them and are most inconvenienced by circumstances, being more likely to live out-of-town, work full time, and have small children) reveals how they think of us and our opinions. It's not surprising to find them more than a little defensive about having this pointed out, even obliquely; I'm sceptical how receptive they would've been to perceived criticism even if it was delivered in accordance with their personal preferences.

(And that's all it is--a preference. There's nothing right or wrong about discussing something on social media versus discussing it via a round robin of private phone calls. Both have benefits and disadvantages. It comes down mainly to what you're used to. But, again, that's not up for discussion because it would require recognising the habits of those who you've always felt comfortable viewing as your juniors as equal in validity to your own.)

[bunj.livejournal.com]

I did see the response, as I am also a friend of Sis on Facebook. Sure, the best way for Aunt to react would have been to send Sis a private email. Ironically, it didn't come off as airing family grievances in public until Aunt chose to take it that way and comment in an open forum. Typing a message alone on your computer is so intimate that one can often forget who can ultimately see what you post.* Aunt's response was the equivalent of overhearing a conversation in a crowded room and then shouting at Sis for all to hear.

I also agree that the whole handling of the situation shows a narrow-minded attitude on the part of the older generation: they see this as 'their' party which they invite us to. Honestly, paying for dinners could have been avoided if planning (and financial support) was officially opened to the younger generation as well. That creates some problems of its own, of course. It means more people involved in planning, and the only fair way to do it would be across nuclear families. Not everyone has the same number of kids (or kids at all), and not all of those kids are adults. As unpleasant as planning by committee can be, it would increase the chance of the tradition continuing.

By the way, I was just joking with my donkey cart crack. I knew what you meant, I just wanted to use 'donkey cart' in a post today. Now I've used it in two posts. Go me.

*I am well aware of the irony involved in putting this in an LJ comment.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Yeah, as I mentioned above, she apparently didn't realise it was public until after consultation with her FB-savvy daughter. I know you see her posts, but your FB use is sporadic enough I thought you might've missed this one. (I didn't see it myself until after she'd left me a cryptic phone message.)

So if you've read her post, you know Sis' objection was more basic: Why does this have to be a catered sit-down dinner at all? Most families (her in-laws included) don't do that. You'd think businesspeople would be more attuned to the pitfalls of groupthink and failing to get buy-in from stakeholders.

[paulintoronto.livejournal.com]

You inspired me to check, and I discover that the last time I wrote a cheque was in 2007, to pay for a German course at the Goethe Institut. (Now, I believe, even they take credit cards.) It does seem like an out-dated vehicle to me. When I lived in France in 2004/2005, it was pretty common for people to pay by cheque in grocery stores. It drove me crazy because the documentation required took forever, and the cashiers seemed to all suffer from short-term memory loss, since they greeted each cheque as if they had never seen one before, even though the previous customer had used on.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

When I lived in Germany, I never used cheques--or credit cards, for that matter. Everything was done via account transfer. And that was over 20 years ago.

[oh-meow.livejournal.com]

Shops haven't taken cheques here in the UK for a few years now. You often get confused old people trying to pay by cheque though and getting really het up when the cashier won't take them, and points to the large sign about no cheques. I once saw an old lady trying to pay in the supermarket with books upon books of Green Shield stamps, which were a reward thing they used to hand out in the 60s and 70s.