Boy billed after bailing on classmate’s birthday party
The parents of a British child are still reeling from the discovery of an invoice for just under $29 in their five-year-old son Alex’s backpack. Their crime? Not informing the parents of his classmate their son would not be attending a birthday party in December.
“It was a proper invoice,” Derek Nash, Alex’s father, told the BBC.
The document included an invoice number, the sender’s banking details and even a space for the U.K. version of sales tax. The offence was listed as a “no-show fee.”
Julie Lawrence, the birthday boy’s mother, has defended the “fee” as necessary to recoup the costs associated with a no-show. She said Alex told her son he would attend the party and took that as proper confirmation. She said the cost covers one ticket to the “child’s party at the ski slope including snow tubing and tobogganing and lunch.”
So where was Alex? With his grandparents, who he chose when his parents realized he was double booked, and it was the only chance he would have to see them before Christmas.
Alex’s mom, Tanya Nash, explained this to Lawrence in a Facebook exchange printed by the Plymouth Herald, the local paper that first broke the story. The ensuing Facebook debate between the two mothers now has parents around the world chiming in.
If Lawrence’s side of the story seems reasonable — she had to pay for Alex when he didn’t show — the Facebook conversation takes quite the turn. The moms fight about whether or not they had each other’s number and who was ruder in how they approached the other parent.