Since apparently everyone is so emotionally invested, here's what happened. Turns out TF Source hadn't sent out Carzap, he was apparently "sold out and put on backorder" (which I took with more than a grain of salt given that TFCC figures are limited runs), yet there was no email notification to let me know this. He did ultimately arrive, but I can't help but wonder if he'd ever have materialised if I hadn't have kicked up a stink or if it would've fallen through the cracks.

I'll admit, the fact that I had a customer show of at work by presenting a taser at me, complete with turning it on, while I was trying to just "suck it up" like work made it clear they expected me to, probably didn't help my mood when dealing with this situation.

Conversely, this issue has shown that among other things, several people in the fan community seem to:

  1. believe that a company not supplying you with goods while claiming they did (and yes, that's exactly what marking items as sent and not actually sending them amounts to) and making items disappear from someone's sales history while failing to inform customers that there is a stock issue and the items are being replenished, somehow equates to a child not getting the toy they wanted at Christmas;
  2. be so illiterate that then cannot differentiate between a term that has it's etymological roots carnival culture and one that has its etymological roots in Social Darwinism and;
  3. be more concerned with their own personal biases the facts of this case.


Furthermore as another recent transaction has shown only tonight, the types of individuals who are so quick to claim I'm a headache, include the types of people who:

  1. after one transaction, expect you to at best, burn employment bridges and at worst, throw away a new job or at best, burn bridges badly with a job you're leaving, by abusing your staff discount to get them a laptop at prices far below what you could even get it on staff discount for.
  2. Then when you say that after what happened you politely tell said individuals that you don't feel comfortable dealing with them any more, they claim they wont contact you again - which to any reasonable person, means any future or pending deals are off the table.
  3. Then 2 weeks later, they ask when you are going ahead with the deal you said you weren't comfortable proceeding with and they weren't contacting you again to complete.
  4. Then when you say that you're aren't comfortable going ahead with the deal which was supposed to be off the table anyway, they then demand the figures back which you bought off them from ebay a month prior, or an additional $150 to keep them.


(Of course I can't wait to hear from people here [not] how I "had it coming to me" - be it in terms of the taser incident at work I was meant to "suck up", the ridiculous employment suicide favour so someone could get a cheap laptop or the extortion. If past experience is anything to go by, and it's certainly been consistent, I know there'll be at least one person who wont be able to help themselves.)

Regardless of how much merit parts of the "he's a hassle" might actually have, when people use it as a cop out when extortion and exploiting people fails, to say it waters down whatever credibility such comments might have, is an understatement.

Oh and in the interests of people's voyeuristic emotional investment, the reason the thread was most likely removed from TCCA was because I left the group when I realised that my ability to suffer fools was exceeded by the nature of the group - including at least one of the admins.

A friend in the UK whom I greatly respect told me that he was done with fan group because of words to the effect of "there's too many idiots".

I'm starting to think he's onto something.