Step by Step

So then, how about a brief outline? Timeline? Something. When, exactly, did you go power mad? Ah, you see, I always wanted to spend six months trying to resolve a situation between the Lit Community and a bug-fucking crazy PVA. Problem was, mooboy, brazensix, anon-y-mouse…those old PVA’s weren’t bug-fucking crazy. Their sanity thwarted me! So I laid low for TWO YEARS, biding my time. (laughing) That’s a retarded scheme. What’s retarded is saying what Lolly said and expecting people to believe it. You got that right. Give me a timeline. What things happened and what did you do? Ugh. Okay. I received a note from mirrorkills, who was a PVA at the time, on May 31, 2005. He recommended a poem for a DD – said, “I know I can feature DD's myself, but this would be a conflict of interest…so I’d rather suggest it and see what happens…” Conflict of interest? His girlfriend wrote it. Great. I gave it a read. But… Not up to snuff? Not by a long shot. It was sweet. It was sentimental. It was about him. And we all should all be so lucky to have someone care about us enough to write something like that. But it was far below the quality level the Lit folks expected from DD’s that represented their community. So you didn’t feature it? I would have been tarred and feathered if I did. So then what? That night was the inaugural gig for one of my bands so I was busy elsewhere from the afternoon until the wee hours. The very next morning, before I had a chance to tell him “thanks but no thanks,” it appeared as a Daily Deviation. He was impatient…I guess? He took it to another PVA with DD privileges, subversive-imaginati, and as fate would have it, she had a good friend to whom she wanted to give a DD. So they swapped – he featured her friend’s piece and she featured his girlfriend’s piece. The Lit Community didn’t like it one bit. When I logged in on June 1, my inbox was full of complaints. So what did you do? Our standard protocol for DD complaints was to direct the complainers to the Admin that featured it rather than having them express their indignation on the deviation itself. Anyway, I directed all complainers to subversive-imaginati, which was proper procedure. I didn’t know she was completely nuts at that time – I didn’t know her at all since she was brand new. So I assumed she would handle it like a professional, like all the other Staff members would. How does a “professional” handle complaints like that? Did you ever get complaints? Of course I did. I got some really nasty ones over the years, but I handled them all the same way – you respond to the note thusly: “Thanks for expressing your concerns to me regarding a recent DD I posted. I realize it is impossible to please everybody all the time, so feedback like yours is valuable in helping me gauge the sensibilities of the deviantART community. Please remember that my door is always open and if you find a poem that you think is worthy, don’t hesitate to send me a note with a link and short write-up. I’ll check it out at my earliest convenience. Thanks again for the feedback – keep it coming!” Bam. Problem defused. There you go. Simple as that, huh? Worked every time. Most of the people who sent nasty notes apologized for the tone in their follow-up note. See, you acknowledge they are upset, you allow them to be upset, and you invite them participate in the whole DD process. If they really do think they can pick DD’s better than you can, then they will try and you’ve just recruited more help. There is no downside to it. She didn’t take that approach, did she? Nope. Rather than handle it like a professional, she started trying to defend the poem – in notes, as well as in the Forum. And the poem was clearly indefensible. And that led to people questioning her ability to assess poetry, which made it personal for her. Uh oh. Yeah, and this is how flustered she got. Follow this one closely. The Lit Community said, “if you think that poem is good, you clearly don’t understand poetry at all,” which, to someone like her, is terribly insulting. So she started defending her “vast knowledge” of verse – “I got A-levels in literature!” (laughing) Yeah? Well I’ve got a hemorrhoid. That doesn’t make me a butt doctor. And then to prove it, she went and loaded the DD queue up with poems in an “I’ll show them!” kind of way. Problem was, those poems were much better than the initial one she posted. So, on one hand it showed she could identify quality writing, but on the other it completely undercut her defense of the initial piece. She wasn’t thinking the whole thing through, was she? Not doing herself any favors. Not at all. And when the discrepancy between the first poem and the others was pointed out, she dropped all that and started defending the whole DD system instead. “It’s not about quality! It’s just what the Staff member liked!” You can call it whatever the hell you want but it is what it is. I don’t think it’s like this any more since they did away with the right-hand column on the site, but back then the DD was the single most effective on-site marketing tool DA had. A poem that was featured as a DD received several hundred more views and between thirty and a hundred more comments than it would have if it hadn’t been featured. People knew this – it wasn’t a secret, and DD’s were therefore coveted. So people didn’t like them being treated as currency like SI and mirrorkills did. What were you doing while this was going on? I stayed out of it as much as I could. But people were forwarding me exchanges they were having via notes with her and it was very disturbing. In one note-exchange she had with a member of Lit she stated, “The only use I have for poems on DA is to print them off so I can wipe my ass.” Oh brother! Yeah. At that point she had been on Staff for two weeks. Starting out with a bang! So what are you supposed to do at that point? I sent an email to Angelo and Jark outlining the situation and asking them to settle it. Ah, guys with the “least knowledge and the most power?” Not at all. Angelo was my superior so I sent it to him. Jark was in charge of the Daily Deviation program so I sent it to him too. Sensible. When was this? June 3. When did they get back to you? June 6. That gave her three more days to get herself all wound up. So by the time Angelo and Jark decided what to do, she had her ego heavily, heavily invested in the outcome. And their decision was to restrict DD's to GD's? They decided that Gallery Directors were to be the only ones who had the right to feature DD’s from their galleries. All other Staff had to seek permission from the GD’s first before they could select anything. Which, ironically, was what the Lit Community had been asking SI to do all along. Didn’t go her way, did it? Nope. And imagine what that did to her psyche. She pulled some monkey business with the DD, treated it like currency, shot her mouth off for six days, and wound up losing the free DD privileges for everyone. Fine work for being two weeks on the job. (laughing) Yikes! I’m sure she handled the decision with dignity and grace. (laughing) How’d you guess? Over in the Staff Forum she started threatening to “ban the ring-leaders.” In her journal she was calling the Lit folks elitists, snobs, prima donnas, entitlement whores, a bunch of children, known for pouting and drama-whoring, and so on and so forth. Nice. What’d you do? I lodged a complaint with her immediate superior, realitysquared, on June 8 about the insults and threats of reprisal she was making. His response was, “I’ve spoken to her about it but the Staff Forum is considered ‘private’ and so is her journal. She can say whatever she wants.” Are you serious?! Well, technically he was correct. But I certainly thought deviantART Staff should be held to a higher standard than that. When the whole episode finally ended – which wasn’t really the end of it – both Angelo's and Lolly's journals declared that Staff should and will be held to higher standards than that. It took six months to arrive at that conclusion? What happened next? It just continued. So on June 29 I sent an email to Angelo with a list of nasty things she’d been saying in publicly accessible places. Good. What’d he do? I got no response. No “I’ll look into it.” No “Well, just leave her alone and let her run out of steam.” No nothing. Nice. Really inspiring leadership. And then? In early July it became clear that realitysquared was actively helping SI with her grudge. He set up an area in the PVA section of the staff wiki entitled, “The Lit Community Rebellion.” (laughing) Dear God! "Rebellion?" What were they "rebelling" against, exactly? Being repeatedly mocked and insulted by a site representative? That's what he considers "rebelling?" What an ass! (laughing) And on one of the pages were lists of names of the “main players” and “possible bit players.” Every name on those lists, with the exception of Toni, was eventually banned. Thewritt was on it and he was banned for poor punctuation. I'm not kidding. It was clear by then that there was something seriously wrong with the PVA. [link] [link] [link] Unbelievable. Instead of fixing the problem early on when he had the chance, he decided to join in with her tantrum? What next? I sent an updated version of that list to Jark in July but he didn’t get a chance to look it over. He said he was involved in something "really serious" with Angelo and would take a look at it when he got the chance. Of course, he never got that chance. Shit-canned. Right. So he was on the wrong end of a coup d’etat and that squashed your chances of ending the issue then and there. Yes, so I redirected everything to his replacement, Lolly. I put that list of comments, updated with the new ones, mind you, that I had sent to Angelo and Jark into the Staff wiki so he could access it quicker. And that led to the whole “meeting” episode? Right.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

Addendum 1 - Debunked | Addendum 2 - Fair & Ethical | Addendum 3 - Step By Step | Addemdum 4 - The Whole Damned Thing