November 24, 2004

• Who, me?
  Let sleeping dogs lie?
  Never!
  Occasionally a lie will slip past me, but if I catch it, I quash it.

  After I lit the fuse on the bomb that blew up into the recent shit storm on KaiOaty, I came back here and reported on my day’s work.  Shortly after that, I received these 3 comments:

  i just read it.
  all of it.
  including the comments.
  good reading kathy
  and good faq reminders.
  Posted 11/21/2004 at 7:38 PM by LuckyStars

  …apparently, if
  you point out the fact that someone is asking too broad a question,
  you’re being mean.  I, for one, am greatly appreciative of your work. 
  If I lived closer, lol, I’d offer my indentured servitude for a week
  Posted 11/21/2004 at 8:32 PM by morriganshadow

  The reading certainly explained the other two. [The 2 FAQ pages I'd posted earlier in the day]  *rolling eyes* Though I enjoyed all the new
  sooooo….
  you’re a ‘fortune teller’ doing the ‘devils work’ ……  Do you get
  that often? (I’m sorry – the high road can be so far to climb sometimes
  )

  I would wonder why one who has that kind of attitude would even
  bother asking for a reading. It is clear why they wouldn’t read any
  explanations.

  I certainly appreciate your talents. I’ve been enjoying your spurt
  of energy lately too. Extremely illuminating. I’ll have to re-read
  (several times, I’m sure) your blog on letting go. That’s a biggy.
  Posted 11/21/2004 at 9:09 PM by maggie_mcfrenzie

  Sweet and supportive, all of you, but not completely
  accurate.  I had made three mistakes with the reading in question,
  none of which my supporters here or my detractors over there mentioned, if they noticed
  them at all.

  First of all, I failed to
  adhere to my own rules over there.  I state explicitly that I
  don’t do readings for people who won’t read the FAQs and follow
  directions.  Like maggie, I had been enjoying my own recent spurt
  of energy and decided, first, to respond to the woman’s inappropriate
  attempt to get me to set a price on a reading.  I let her know
  that’s not how I operate, and gave her a link to the “bottom line” page
  that details my payment policy.  Then I said she needed to read
  the FAQ.

  I wanted to read for her, and so when she later came back with the
  garbled, incoherent and illiterate request for a raft of readings of a
  type (“fortune teller” predictions) I don’t do, I went back to her and
  explained that, suggesting again that she read the FAQ, and giving her
  what I thought to be fair warning.  I said if I didn’t hear from
  her again before her turn came up, I would answer the two little
  questions in her run-on, breathless, weirdly punctuated “sentence” that
  I could, and “do my best” with the rest.

  She did not respond to that warning.

  Secondly (and for this I
  berated myself soundly as soon as I realized it) I had failed to recognize
  in her the signs of NPD.  No pathological narcissist is going to
  think that FAQs, rules and established procedures apply to
  HER.   It was not until the narcissistic injury I gave her triggered her rage and she came back on me that I saw the signs.  Silly me.  Mea culpa; mea maxima culpa.
  

  [update:  After reading this
  entry, the person who had dropped that incoherent and illiterate garble
  on my other site, sent me a quite composed and mostly standard English
  email filled with ingratiating pleas that we "get
  past this whole thing," which was my intent in posting this entry.  In addition to its ingratiation
  confirming the NPD diagnosis, the email suggests two more things:  1)she
  believes I still may be a source of narcissistic supply for her or
  fears further narcissistic injury from me, and 2) she may well have
  been chemically impaired
  when she composed the request for the reading.  The only other
  explanations I can think of, given her demonstrated ability to write
  intelligibly, are that she depends heavily on spell-check which was not
  available in that comment box, or that the request was written by her
  teenage daughter and she is covering for her.  That latter alternative seems absurd, but....  Someone else,
  who'll remain nameless because I don't want to expose her to
  retaliation, has suggested that the entire thing was done by a young
  person with an agenda.  I don't know.]

  My third error was
  unprofessional conduct.  In one of her followup comments, she
  implied obliquely that I was ridiculing her.  In that she was
  mistaken.  I was informing her,
  attempting to set her straight on the things she would have known had
  she read the FAQ.  However, I did hold her up to ridicule by
  copying her request into a more public place than the comment box on
  another person’s reading where she had placed it, and letting others
  who might be inclined to ridicule know its source. 

  By writing the two FAQs for the information of any subsequent
  potential clients who, like her, failed to read and heed the procedures
  on that site, using her as an object lesson, I behaved
  unprofessionally.  The proper course would have been to answer her
  two acceptable questions privately and to copy the object-lesson
  illiterate “comment” without attribution to a specific author. 
  Again, mea culpa. 
  I did what I could to remedy it after the fact by deleting the reading
  and the entire thread of comments on it as well as those scattered on
  other readings I’d done later.

  It has been a learning experience.  I won’t make that mistake again.

  Maybe.

  With me, ya never know.

  ---

  maggie_mcfrenzie asked me a question in her comment above:

  sooooo….
  you’re a ‘fortune teller’ doing the ‘devils work’ ……  Do you get
  that often?

  No, not very often.  There are those without much metaphysical
  savvy who won’t grasp the difference between a fortune teller and a
  psychic counselor or intuitive even if it is explained to them. 
  Fortune tellers are entertainers, much like the “mentalists” whose stage
  shows were all the rage for several decades around a century ago. 
  Fortune tellers even have their own numerical classification in the U.S.
  Department of Labor’s Dictionary of Occupational Titles.
  [(amusement & recreation)
  159.647-018]  It comes right after “fortune cookie maker” in the
  alphabetical index.  My DOT designation is 045.107-010.

  Briefly, a fortuneteller generally tells people what she knows they
  want to hear, while I tell them what I feel they need to know. 
  Big difference, and I don’t understand why it is so hard for some
  people to understand.

  That “devil’s work” bullshit is something different, something
  taught by some Xian fundy sects.  I get that a lot less frequently
  than I’m accused of being a fortune teller.  Those sects are
  relatively small and obscure.  I wouldn’t have known about them at
  all if it were not for some of their adherents who have harrassed and
  persecuted me during my professional career.  I’ve certainly never
  stepped within any of their churches.

  They’ve never liked it when I (or one of my associates) pointed out
  to them that THEY are the Satanists, since it is they and not I who
  believe in Satan.  There’s a bit more about that matter in
  the Flim Flam, Hocus Pocus, Mumbo Jumbo and Gobbledygook FAQ I wrote.

  Occasionally, at a fair or festival, I’d need to call security to
  remove some of them.  They would sit down blocking access to my
  booth, singing hymns and passing out garishly printed little bible
  tracts filled with misspelled misrepresentations of scripture.  We
  used to find a lot of them in the trash after festivals.  (the
  tracts, although it would have been a joy to find a fundie or two in
  there, too)

  Or they would walk up to the people waiting outside my booth for
  their turn to come in and have a reading, and explain to them that I do
  the devil’s work and my predictions (those predictions that I staunchly
  refuse to make even when asked to) come true because they go straight
  from my mouth to Satan’s ears.  Y’know — those pointy ears there
  beside his shiny red horns.  Excuuse me, but I cannot take that
  shit seriously.

  One hysterical woman even rushed into my booth and laid hands on the
  client seated at my table, shouting in broken English with a German
  accent that she (the client) was imperilling her immortal soul by
  sitting there, and tried to drag her out.  I hope the client
  pressed charges for assault.  About that time, the security men
  that Charley had summoned came and dragged the hysterical one
  out.  Shaken but undeterred, the client sat back down and listened
  to the rest of her reading.  She appreciated it, too.

  Later that same evening after the fair shut down and I had closed
  the flap on my pavilion while I packed up inside, another woman I
  recognized as one of the fundies brushed aside the flap and slipped
  in.  Her booth was just across the way from mine, and the
  hymn-singers had moved over there after security made them move out of
  the way in front of mine.  She wore the mid-calf-length flowered
  chintz dresses I’d seen on all the women in that group, and in her
  booth she sold little hand-painted wooden wall plaques with bible
  verses and cutesy quasi-philosophy.

  Charley had gone off to bring around the car so we could load up our
  stuff, and I had an apprehensive moment there, until she spoke. 
  With occasional glances over her shoulder to make sure nobody could see
  her (and I suppose she presumed that no one on the other side of the
  flap could hear her — it’s astounding what a strong illusion of
  privacy can be provided by a hanging bedsheet ), she stammered out her
  request.  She had watched me all weekend.  She had listened
  to Charley explaining the nature of my work to passers-by and
  looky-lous.  She had heard many of my regular clients discussing
  me as they sat around waiting their turns. 

  She wanted a reading.  She was in evident distress beyond that
  caused by being there in the first place.  She had a personal
  concern involving an abusive relationship.  I put the tablecloth
  back down, got out my cards and gave her the reading.  She
  was in tears before I’d gone very far.  When I reached out and
  laid my hand on the back of hers, she started sobbing.  I sat
  there and held her hand until she sobbed it out.  Then I gave her
  a tissue and a drink of water, finished the reading and discussed her options with
  her.  She finally left with a smile, after pulling several
  crumpled bills out of her pocket and stuffing them in my donation
  basket, explaining that she’d give me more, but that was all the money
  she had that her husband didn’t know about.

  After she slipped out, Charley, who had come back while I was
  reading for her and heard most of it, came in and gave me a high-five,
  a big grin and a long, close hug, saying not a word.  We both know
  how thin those bedsheets are.

  Another wee note before I lay that particular shitstorm to rest:
  Ren and Greyfox
  both thought that the illiterate and uninformed request from the NPD
  woman had been a setup by someone hoping to expose me as a fraud. 
  It now appears that they were prescient, as apparently also was my
  pendulum that agreed with them after the fact.  That “skeptic” came later.

  My quotes around “skeptic” simply reflect the attitude of a linguistic purist.  Hellenistic skepticism
  was an open-minded philosophy of free thought.  In modern usage
  the word has been co-opted by a lot of people who would use it as a
  euphemism for prejudice and a smoke-screen for their attempts to
  justify opposition to one belief and adherence to an opposing belief.

  The less we believe, the better off we are.

    

  • 3:42 pm
  • 7 Comments