Party Foul

Earlier this year, I realized that Halloween actually fell on a Friday this year. Australians don't really celebrate anywhere near the same way that we do back in the U.S., and since it's easily one of my favorite holidays, I decided I would throw a party with my friend Jules and show the Aussies how it's done.

So I booked the biggest room at one of my favorite bars in Sydney, and even had a designer at work create an invite for me to email out:


And as I always do, I wrote up a long email to set the scene and get people interested in the party, and emailed it out last week. I also decided to create it as a Facebook event, since I actually don't have email addresses for a lot of friends.

So you can imagine my shock when I caught up with Busty on Saturday for some drinks, and she asked me if I had found my Halloween invitation text on the internet. When I asked why she would think that, she told me that she had actually received almost the exact same invitation on Facebook from a different friend a day after she had received and accepted mine.

That's right -- her friend saw my invite on Facebook, COPIED AND PASTED the text over to her own invite, and after some minor changes (including location and date, of course) sent it out to all of her friends. Naturally I had a few questions:

1) Who does that?!

2) If you are going to do something that tacky and unoriginal, wouldn't you at least NOT invite the person who received my invite the previous day?

3) WHO DOES THAT?!!


I immediately had Busty text message this chick to let her know that I thought she was a thief. Most people have told me that I should be flattered, but I think I'm more bothered by the fact that others might see my invite and think that it was ME who was being unoriginal. As if.

The thief (who I feel I should mention is Canadian - figures) has since admitted to stealing my invite, and said I should come to her party, which I think I find even more insulting. I have passed along my own invitation to her, saying she should come to my party as "a Plagiarist", and I will be more than happy to have a shirt waiting for her with "COPY" on the front and "PASTE" on the back.

Loser.