My Comment for Haiti period is over, and I’m pleased to announce that I’m sending Partners in Health a donation of $200 as a result. There were 29 messages total, 26 here and another 3 on Facebook (you are a Facebook fan of WTEB, aren’t you?). At $5 per that’s $145, but it felt a little light so I rounded up.
To be perfectly honest, I’m embarrassed by this whole endeavor. I posted that $5/pop promise in haste, and tweeted it immediately. And then the retweets started, and people commended me for my generosity, and I panicked. Images of retweets and retweets of retweets danced in my head with little dollar signs attached. My mind raced straight to bankruptcy court. I came back here and added a little PS, saying that I may have to cap my donation at some point.
Next came the really embarrassing part: I stopped promoting my pledge. So instead of having more comments than I could handle, I wound up with a perfectly respectable 29. Respectable, but not as many as I was anticipating, and nowhere near as many as I’d feared. Hence the rounding up.
Today’s lesson: Before you go making grandiose announcements on the Internets, stop and think for a minute. If I’d pledged $1 per comment, I’d have promoted the heck out of my post. Instead, I made a promise and then worried about how I’d keep it.
If I could take a mulligan, I’d do it all over again.