By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

All I wanted were two tickets. And yet somehow I inadvertently donated $2,640 to a local parenting center in Maplewood, which was screening a movie on the Freedom March. I have to believe it was stupid decimal error on my part that got carried over onto the Eventbrite website. Individual tickets to the screening were around $12.50, then there was a service charge, and well, you get the picture.

The only way I knew about my donation (because it had yet to show up on my credit card) is that I got a lovely thank you email from the local Parenting Center in South Orange/Maplewood, asking if I (or my organization) wanted credit for my donation in their bulletin.

Imagine my surprise.  I’d like to think I’m a generous person, and it’s true I just took a civil rights trip with my temple. The difficulties faced by African Americans in this country and around the Freedom March in particular are certainly known to me, and I admit, more on my mind than they were six months ago. However, I’m not supportive – can’t be supportive — to the tune of $2,640 to a local parenting center springing for a single screening of a single film.

The woman who wrote to me understood my dilemma and suggested that we both contact Eventbrite. Eventbrite sounds like a lovely cartoon character – am I confusing it with Rainbow Brite? —a smiling creature who would be conciliatory and understanding (in neon colors, no less) of my dilemma. But the reality of Eventbrite is that it is a San Francisco website, and before I called this morning at 9:30, I assumed there’d be no possibility for human interface. Boy, was I wrong.

I actually connected with a young woman who totally “got,” as she put it, why I wouldn’t want to give such a hefty amount to an organization sponsoring a film for a one evening. Even when my own children were younger, I never gave this kind of lofty sum to the Millburn High School PTO. However, she noted that all Eventbrite is is an online platform, and to reverse the charge, I’d have to go back to the event organizer, the woman who sent me the thank you email.

Let me just clarify that the reason I was not aware of my mammoth pledge is because I use another website to organize my emails. The receipt for this Eventbrite transaction went into something called “SaneBox Later, “and while I might have seen the receipt if I really parsed the emails that go into this box, many of which are from clothing companies informing me about sales, I never, in fact, do this. My decimal foible went undetected.

Oddly enough, my credit card company often questions real purchases I make, including those at an online supermarket app that I like and a local clothing store I frequent. Not this time. This one made it past the algorithm that earmarks things as suspicious and stops them from going through.

What’s really strange is that I’ve spent the last month on an app called “Elevate” honing, or attempting to hone, my math skills. One of the exercises involves adding up numbers in which decimal points aren’t clearly aligned. I’d like to report that recently for the first time I’ve scored 100 percent on this exercise. Clearly, there is no correlation between success on this app and the use of decimals in real life. Stay turned for news about my refund.