Text 13660, 178 rader
Skriven 2007-04-20 01:13:17 av Amy Guskin (23.babylon5)
     Kommentar till en text av rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated
Ärende: OT: Finesse contest finalists - thanks to all!
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Dear all,

Apologies right up front for the length of this tome.

As many of you have seen by now, I am not one of the 20 finalists in the 
Finesse contest.  I would have beat Penny to the punch in telling you that, 
except that I've been agonizing about how best to tell you about what's been 
going on since the contest ended -- which is surprisingly ugly for a contest 
whose aim was related to beauty.

The contest ended on Saturday night, March 31st, and thanks to the utterly 
amazing people I know (both online and the geographically proximate variety), 
I managed to finish SIXTH in a field of nearly one thousand entries.  This, 
despite the very last minute entries who mobilized their troops to get them a 
high ranking with their low scores.  It truly was impressive (your voting, I 
mean), and based on what they seemed to be looking for from both the 
submission guidelines and the content of their ads, it seemed all but 
impossible for me to lose -- especially since they'd expanded the finalists' 
field from ten to _twenty_.  So I basically just forgot about the contest 
after Saturday night, figuring I'd hear about my finalist status on the 16th, 
along with everybody else.

Then, Thursday, April 5th came.  And on Thursday afternoon, I received a 
startling number of e-mail notifications of comments to my blog.  Now, I 
hardly ever update my blog, and in fact, the latest entry at that point was 
dated from November 2006, and was about...the Finesse contest.  It included a 
link to vote me a "10," and a reminder to vote my competitors a "1."  So I 
opened the first of the e-mails...and felt like I was struck across the face. 
 It was a VERY ugly, VERY nasty note about how I'm a cheater, I have an ugly 
soul, and someone ought to tell Finesse how I cheated.  The next one said I 
was a bitch.  The next said they'd seen better hair on a horse.  The next, 
"cheaters never prosper."  Etc.  I kept reading them -- they were all made 
anonymously via blogger.com's comment feature -- and I very quickly realized 
that I'd better turn off the open comment feature, and delete those comments.

I finally got to the last comment (I was still receiving them via e-mail, 
even if they weren't appearing on my blog), and it was from someone who 
kindly -- anonymously -- told me where all of the ire was coming from.  It 
was coming from a thread on a message board dedicated to sweepstakes players. 
 This is one of those communities frequented by people who find out about 
sweepstakes from various sources, post the information about them online, 
enter, and report on their annual winnings.  When it's a voting contest (best 
photo of your kid, best poem about a parrot, best hard-luck story about your 
first car, etc. etc.), they all exhort one another to vote for each other, as 
you'd expect (and exactly as I did with you guys).  It seems to be an actual 
occupation for some of them -- or maybe a religion would be more correct.

Several women from this community had entered the Finesse contest.  One 
particular woman started this ugly nonsense.  She'd apparently been going 
through withdrawal after the contest ended, did a search on some terms 
(presumably on Google Groups), and found our various threads on the subject.  
She proclaimed that she was "livid" that I had "cheated" by having people 
vote "1"s for my competition in such an organized fashion (a list!  a list!), 
and she wanted advice on what to say to Finesse when she wrote to complain 
about me.  Her 'sweeper' friends all rallied to her side, told her what a 
terrible person I obviously was, that I was clearly a bitch -- they could see 
it in my smirk -- and that I had absolutely cheated.  Many of them promised 
to write to Finesse and ask that I be disqualifed for "cheating," and one 
woman frighteningly said that she would "hound Finesse forever" if they 
allowed me to win!

Oh, and they also didn't like that we'd bestowed descriptive nicknames on 
some of the entries -- but how else were we supposed to refer to people for 
whom we didn't have names?

At some point, the original poster found her way to my website and blog, and 
posted those URLs on her poisonous thread.  I've always been a very public 
persona online, and I use real addresses in my various newsgroups, so I'm not 
hard to find.  I don't _want_ to be.  And while my site and blog _are_ 
public, this thread ended up becoming wholly devoted to libelling me, sending 
me abusive and threatening e-mail, and making baseless accusations about me 
to Finesse that could conceivably jeopardize my entry.  So I decided to ask 
the board's administrator to delete the thread, since it was so clearly 
abusive.

I had to join the community in order to get access to the administrator.  
That becomes important later.

The administrator read my e-mail, wrote back _very_ quickly with an apology, 
and pulled the thread.  I managed to save a couple of pages before it 
disappeared, in case I needed some kind of verification of my story.

So then it was the weekend, and I started agonizing over this.  I thought it 
would certainly look improper for a contestant to contact Finesse during the 
judging phase, but I also thought that it was important for them to know that 
this wasn't some groundswell of disappointed individuals who all came to this 
conclusion independently; that this was an organized initiative by one 
contestant with a very bad case of sour grapes because she didn't finish as 
well as she'd hoped to.  After much deliberation, I wrote them a brief, clear 
note explaining the situation, that I had been the victim of these 
'sweepstakes professionals,' and expressing that I hoped that this woman's 
baseless accusations wouldn't affect my entry.

I didn't hear back from them.

Monday the 16th came and went, and no finalists were posted (that was the day 
they were supposed to appear).  Since we were in the midst of that 
record-breaking Nor'easter here in this region, I figured I wouldn't get 
worried until Tuesday.  Early Tuesday morning, I went to the contest site and 
the finalists were posted.  And, needless to say, I was gobsmacked -- not 
just because I wasn't there, but because of who _was_ there.  (Including 
someone who'd broken the rules by having two entries -- two entries that were 
sometimes both on the Top Ten page simultaneously, so you could hardly have 
missed that she'd cheated!)

Since I'd never received a reply to my e-mail, and doubt was gnawing at me, I 
called up Finesse and asked to speak to someone about an e-mail I'd sent 
regarding the contest.  I've had a couple of phone conversations with them 
this week, mainly because the customer care person to whom they referred me 
didn't know anything about it, and had to do some research -- but she's told 
me that she is reasonably sure that the judges never saw ANY of the e-mails.  
Not the ones from the accusers, nor mine.  But she hasn't actually verified 
that yet, which is why I am still waiting to hear from her, and why I hadn't 
posted about this earlier this week (I hoped to have definitive word from 
them before doing so).  She also wasn't able to tell me how the judges made 
their choices, but said she wished she did!

One thing I did verify with her: voting ANY number for ANY contestant once a 
day, whether an organized effort or not (and thanks to Hilary for that 
amazing strategy, which I'm certain kept me in the Top Ten right up to the 
end!), was NOT cheating.  Nor was it even slightly morally wrong.  In fact, I 
was exactly the kind of contestant they wanted: someone who would get 
hundreds of their friends engaged, and visiting their website, and thinking 
about Finesse every day for several months.

So, where it currently stands is that, according to someone at Finesse who 
really doesn't know for sure, I didn't make the finals because of whatever 
parameters of merit the judges were using, and not because of any discomfort 
they had over potential controversy created by the sour grapes people.  But 
we'll probably never know that for sure.  Looking at the finalists, I can't 
even begin to fathom what they were looking for.  Honestly, it seems to me 
that they must have put all the entries in a barrel and picked randomly!  I 
think that most of those entries were awful, and not because the women aren't 
attractive, or that their hair is bad.  Just because they were so 
unremarkable -- photographically, stylistically -- compared to some of the 
_other_ entries, and don't seem to measure up as well as others based on the 
submission guidelines.  I mean, as self-involved as I can be, there _were_ 
other entries I really liked, and I was kind of excited to see how many of 
them would make the finals.  NONE of them did.  And I don't think my sense of 
aesthetics, or my ability to comprehend the submission guidelines, could be 
_that_ far off!  So the results are, to me at least, a total mystery.

As for the pile of nasty comments I received, I feel like I got a teeny 
little taste of what celebrities have to put up with...and I have a lot more 
empathy for them now.  I wasn't bothered by the comments that attacked my 
appearance; I'm comfortable with who I am.  But the idea that these women 
thought it was okay to tell me that I had an "ugly soul," that I was a 
dreadful person, that bad things should happen to me...well, it was a very 
sobering experience.  It was particularly awful because I was also dealing 
with my father being hospitalized and undergoing a (minor) cardiac procedure 
during all of this, and it was just so much dross that I really did _not_ 
need.

So now we come to the irony of my having to join that community.  Joining 
gave me access to their forum archives, and so I did some searches of my own, 
on the original sour-grapes poster and the Finesse contest posts she'd made.  
And I found her Finesse contest URL.  This was before I wrote to Finesse, so 
I actually could have told them, "...and here's the contest URL of the nasty 
woman who has been trying to have me disqualified for no valid reason, and 
who is responsible for prompting an entire community of people to send me 
abusive e-mails" but I didn't.  She was so certain that I am morally inferior 
to her, and a bad person, but when given the chance, I chose _not_ to be 
spiteful, and _not_ to reveal her identity to Finesse.  Even if she didn't 
agree, my feeling was that everyone who entered the contest fair and square 
deserved an equal chance to win.

At the end of all of this, as bad as the last two weeks have been, I'm 
satisfied with my entry and how I finished.  I can't say I'm not disappointed 
-- the money would have been very useful, and I sure wouldn't have minded 
being able to call myself, howsoever briefly, a model -- but I did _really_ 
well, and even if the judges didn't agree, certainly the popular vote and the 
_amazing_ support from my various communities made me feel like a winner.  
So, thanks once again to you all.  I'm sorry I couldn't bring home the trophy 
after all of your hard work.

Amy
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