It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are
far more than our abilities. ~ Albus Dumbledore
1. It was a conflict of interest.
2. I should be paying Butch because it brought so much traffic to my site.
3. I really shouldn't complain about not getting paid by the NCCSS or Rockome Gardens because I made enough already through CraftGossip thanks to Butch.
1. None of my bosses at the time minded, so it was not a conflict of interest.
2. Butch hired me knowing ALL ABOUT CraftGossip, and with the full intention of using it as a resource to advertise the NCCSS. I was more than happy to do that, as my CraftGossip blog wouldn't begin to earn money without Internet traffic, and a link from Rockome Gardens' website to me here on CraftGossip would have been very beneficial. Butch was to link to my CraftGossip blog immediately after he hired me; that was part of my CONTRACT with him. He failed to meet his contractual obligations and didn't link to me until approximately seven weeks afterward. This lengthy delay caused me to lose out on a significant opportunity to develop an audience for my CraftGossip blog -- some portion of which would still be regular readers today, which is called a "loss of future income" in legal terms. Butch is lucky I'm not presently planning to sue him for that loss of future income, but then, I'm still attempting to collect what I was owed to begin with from him.
3. Many needlework designers work two jobs -- their designing job, and their "paying job." I was working two jobs also -- my CraftGossip job, and what was supposed to be MY paying job until I do actually bring in enough to comfortably rely on just my CraftGossip earnings. Butch stiffed me. It's similar to working one job during the week and a second one on weekends. I expected to get paid for both, and I trust I will eventually get paid by CraftGossip -- but Butch stole from me. I was NOT a willing, informed, or consenting VOLUNTEER for either CraftGossip or Rockome Gardens' NCCSS. CraftGossip knows this and is honest. Butch took advantage of me and is dishonest.
Chinese visit a four-story, free-of-charge public restroom in Chongqing, China Saturday July 7, 2007. They're flushing with pride in a southwestern Chinese city where a recently opened porcelain palace features an Egyptian facade, soothing music and more than 1,000 toilets spread out over 3,000 square meters (32,290 square feet). Officials in Chongqing are preparing to submit an application to Guinness World Records to have the public restroom listed as the world's largest, state-run China Central Television reported Friday.(AP Photo)
Here's a tip: Wanna stop the cycle of "safety panics" at your workplace? Give each person who works some privacy and dignity.
Then look at the pay scales of everyone in the company, and give all the secretaries, assistants, and janitorial staff a gigantic raise. Watch how suddenly, all the "unsafe" feelings disappear as if by magic!
I have NOT received my full pay. NOT EVEN CLOSE.
(1) I worked for 7.5 FULL WEEKS. I started on 4/7/07, the same day on which I interviewed with you, Butch. It was not even until 5/23/07 -- ALREADY 6.5 WEEKS into the job -- that I made my numerous unsuccessful attempts to get a paycheck from you known to anyone else. At that point, instead of paying me which would have resolved the problem quickly and amicably, you refused to contact me privately either by phone or email and resorted to criticizing me for making things "public" -- when what I did was let the designers involved with the NCCSS as vendors and instructors know about the situation through PRIVATE, BY INVITATION ONLY, YahooGroups I'd previously set up to organize the show. Despite my better judgment, I then continued to work another full week, for a total of 7.5 FULL WEEKS, while still unsuccessfully trying to get my paycheck. LOOK AT A CALENDAR, BUTCH, AND PAY ME WHAT YOU OWE ME, THIEF. WITH 30% INTEREST!!!
(2) You agreed to pay me $10 an hour for ALL hours onsite. I was onsite for a 2+ hour meeting with you and Angie on 4/10/07. Standard operating procedures dictated by both the state of Illinois and the federal government state you must also pay me for the 2.25 hour round-trip commute to that meeting and its mileage, since I was a contract employee and my normal work location was out of my home. Total hours onsite are thus estimated to be 4.5 at $10 an hour. For the mileage, you can put my address and Rockome's address into Maps On Us and double that for round-trip mileage of 113 miles.
(3) You also owe me reimbursement for mailing expenses for items I mailed to you for NCCSS business (not my personal NCCSS issues as a show participant or to take classes) during the 7.5 weeks I worked for you. I estimate a total of $8.
(4) You also owe me reimbursement for business use of my cable Internet and phone for two months, which cost me $109 per month, so you owe me $109.
(5) Because you knew the value of the job I was doing, and because doing this form of payment was something you could write off as a business expense (and was also something which you did not have to pay me all at once, which was beneficial for you), you had also agreed IN WRITING to pay ALL my expenses to attend Celebration of Needlework. The hotel costs alone are over $1000. You were also to pay travel costs, food costs while there, and class attendance and registration fees. Class registration fees were to be paid on 5/18/07. I estimate you owe me a bare minimum of $2500 for this part of your legal contract with me.
(6) I worked 16 hour days straight for 7.5 weeks (and I wasn't spending the majority of my time reading a library book like Tonya did for $10 an hour just because she was onsite during the show -- hi, Tonya!). Because the initial $500 per month we agreed to comes nowhere near close to minimum wage for the hours I needed to work in order to get the job you assigned to me done and also, obviously, did not include overtime, I was forced to file two complaints with the Illinois Department of Labor, and they have accepted both as justified. The first is for non-payment of wages. The second is for minimum wage and overtime violations; this complaint totaled closer to $10,000 due me (which certainly justifies my demand for the Celebration of Needlework compensation you promised me).
These are the numbers the Illinois Department of Labor has, so you might as well get your math straight now. It will look much better for you and the owners of Rockome Gardens if you are at least properly trying to take care of this matter in an amicable fashion when they come to investigate. The Illinois Department of Labor can and very well may fine you extensively in addition to requiring you to pay me what I am owed and/or put you entirely out of business. I think that would be a shame and tried everything I could to avoid this route, but you refused to even pick up the phone and call me -- and I'm the easy one to reach.
Setting here logging on to my email and finding 43 emails in the NCCSS folder, I thought to myself what now. This time I am excited about seeing all the posts, The show has gone extremely well, I would like to thank TONYA and ANGIE who without them this show would not have happened. I would even like to thank Stacy for the start of the process. Yes it was a struggle and yes I stepped on a few toes, but I think it is safe to say that with the excitement for next year I am here to make this statement very plain.
The 2008 National Counted Cross Stitch Show will even be better, YES IT WILL RETURN. I plan on recruiting Angie and Tonya and Connie to be a part of the team.
We will have the dates posted in the very near future, This group will remain active and I invite those positive and the negative to share constructive improvements so we can work even harder to make it better together. I would hope that the posts would be on our group here or sent to me or Angie and not posted on pay for hit sites. I do not have any association with any pay for hit site nor do I support these sites.
Note to the list ..
I sent a message on June 15, wishing all of you much success for this show .. but my message was deleted and was never posted. This may well be an exercise in futility, but I'm going to step up and respond to Butch's comments, particularly since he SAID he WANTS the negative ones to be posted here.
Butch ..
I'll never say anything behind your back that I will not say directly to your face .. so .. since you said that you want truth and open honesty .. here it is.
"I would like to thank TONYA and ANGIE who without them this show would not have happened. I would even like to thank Stacy for the start of the process."
What about HEATHER? The woman you contracted with BECAUSE she had a highly visable public website to help promote your show? You may remember her .. she worked a couple of months for you putting in 18 to 20 hour days. Stacy, for her own reasons, had to back away. Heather worked her own health into a frazzle. Can't you find the courtesy in your heart to thank her publicly?
"This group will remain active and I invite those positive and the negative to share constructive improvements so we can work even harder to make it better together. I would hope that the posts would be on our group here or sent to me or Angie and not posted on pay for hit sites. I do not have any association with any pay for hit site nor do I support these sites."
Truly amazing .. since the reason you "hired" Heather was for the exposure of that website. Today I spoke directly with her and asked her point blank .. somewhere, somehow, down the line, you should be generating "some" income from the number of hits your website receives, right? THAT HAS NOT HAPPENED YET. YES, at some point in the future .. that theoretically should happen. It is PAID FOR by the ADVERTISING on the website. It does NOT come out of the person who visit's checkbooks or their pockets in any way. ALL companies advertise .. even Rockome spent HOW MANY thousands of $ on a non-descriptive advert on national programming. Apparently, Butch, you see the value of name recognition and were willing to dip into your pocket and pay for it as a business expense. That is PRECISELY what advertisers do. But they do NOT charge those who SEE the advertising for the privilege. For you to infer otherwise is misleading and an insult to the intelligence of every stitcher involved, period. For someone NOT affiliated .. you certainly wanted Heather to spend hours getting the show information, class descriptions, and other important data up and out there. THAT, she did. She honored the terms of her agreement with you. Step on toes? There are words for what you did .. but I won't use them on this list.
"I plan on recruiting Angie and Tonya and Connie to be a part of the team."
Like many others .. I'm curious WHO Connie is. Yes, it's apparent that I have intense loyalties to my friend Heather. She has NEVER lied to me, never cheated me, never told me anything that turned out to be a half-truth. In the years I've known her, when she says she'll do something .. I could ALWAYS count on her to follow through. I still can. ANY employer with a lick of sense in his head would recognize those qualities and work hard to coax her to come back and be involved with this show, rather than use this forum to take not-so-subtle snipes at her. Even with the harsh feelings and how badly she was treated, Heather still cared enough about this show to come, to speak with Angie several times and to make many suggestions about how to make the next show a better one. She genuinely CARES about not only the BUSINESS of the show, Butch, she cares about the PEOPLE of the show. She cares about the integrity of the judging process and the standards.
Which brings me to one other comment. I've seen the original post from Coni and recognize the name from other lists I'm on and involved with. Some of you seem to think that those coments were written by Heather with a fake name to hide behind. Let me assure you that the woman exists and that SHE wrote the note herself. Many ofher comments were totally valid. The promotion of this show SHOULD have begun as soon as Butch took over .. not 8 weeks beforehand. Heather was set an impossible task working with people that she knew actively disliked her and tried to block her every positive or constructive move .. and yet .. she came in and did an amazing task. When she pulled back and away .. didn't any of you realize that she had TRIED to go through the appropriate private channels, and was ignored, the same as I was? Shame on all of you who said mean things about her. Just remember .. what goes around, comes around and karma can be severe. Heather deserves an apology from many of the people on this list. I hope she receives them. And knowing her, if she does, she'll post a thank you for that.
Truly, I'm GLAD the show went as well as it did. I know that Angie worked her tail off, too. Start making plans and doing the scutwork NOW for the next show. As Coni said .. get the information about the local Guilds and contact them to get the word out. That cannot be done in a whirlwind of a few weeks, it requires time to do that groundwork.
You have a unique opportunity right now. It's very rare for a show that has died to be resurrected. You have a good chance of doing that. If you can, it will not only be good for Rockome, it will be good for the stitchers and the industry. I wish all of you well with your efforts.Maggie Pringlemeir, D Div, PhD
DrMaggie @ aol.com
As I said above, I could have removed everything from CraftGossip when I didn't get my first paycheck from Rockome Gardens. I didn't do that because I did NOT want to hurt the designers' businesses any further than YOU, Butch, had already harmed them by your neglect and refusal to properly advertise the show in the first place. Instead, I put up a truthful disclaimer about my own experience, withdrew my personal endorsement of the show, and kept stitchers as well informed as I could of the goings-on at Rockome Gardens once I was no longer in the loop myself. That's a long way from trying to give the show a black eye or derail it. If the controversy this created helped give me any income at all (as if that were any of YOUR business, Butch), I damned well deserved it, you lying thief -- and it brought more income to you, too, because it brought the curious stitchers who wouldn't have come at all this year to Rockome Gardens just to check out the show for a day. So thank the controversy YOU created; I think that was your intention all along. All I did was SPEAK OUT and make it public -- and in doing so, I at least doubled the income the NCCSS brought to you and to each vendor. Now I expect my cut, and I still expect the rest of what you owed me to begin with IN FULL!
Just because you wrote some thing doesn’t mean it’s copyrighted. You have to file for a copyright through the Library of Congress and have a copyright number for there to be any copyright infringement.This reader is wrong, of course. If she were a lawyer or had asked her own legal team, they would have told her so in order that she not come across as misinformed.
I hope your legal team tells you that.
Rockome gets instructors at a discount rate.
I will be teaching in Kansas City the weekend after Rockome and my usual fees prevail there. I am compensated for air travel, shuttles to and from all airports, lodging and meals, kit costs and $100.00 per student for a 6 hour session. I do not pay for use of a facility and I require a minimum of 12 students for a booking.
At Rockome I will be teaching 7 hours per day on two days, provide a kit at my expense ($35.00 wholesale cost), pay for my own travel, lodging and meal expenses and will be paid $75.00 leaving me a very small profit. I have agreed to teach the class with no minimum as to attendees.
I accept this as a marketing expense and hope to make up the difference with sales in my booth.
