These retired folks have way too much time on their hands, and end up calling me up when I’m working ! Terrible! I just got off the phone and reset a password so James could get into hairtell, so I’d like to take a moment to welcome back my long time friend and mentor and previous moderator of hairtell, James Walker himself.
Seana
Welcome back, James!
I joined very recently and have learned a lot from reading your posts ^^
(Not related to electrology, but I found a copy of the Diet Cure book and it looks like it’ll be a really fantastic read! I love learning about nutrition.)
I wish more experts rejoined this forum. It’ll help strengthen electrolysis communities.
You are welcome Ketsele.
I’m glad you were able to get some good use out of my crying out in the wilderness so long ago.
Add The Mood Cure by the same author to your summer reading list and you might find yourself understanding a lot of things that may not have made sense before.
In any event. Best of health to you.
There are very particular reasons why most people who didn’t ever participate here chose not to, and even more particularly predictable reasons those who don’t anymore stopped.
I don’t see that changing any time soon, unfortunately.
Oh, the stories I could tell…
Nora let me explain to you some of the circumstances that occurred that cause this unfortunately, to be a rare occasion. When I first started posting actively on hairtell(after reading for many years more) we had many really top notch professional electrologists from around the world. Here’s a woefully inadequate list of just a few of them: Michael Bono, James Walker, Deedra Fahey, Christine OConnell, Beate Ritzert, Josepha Reina , Arlene Batz, Kelly Morrissey, Adriene Sanchiz, . . ,. We also had a few manufacturers of equipment like Skip Mahler and the founder of Laurier Instruments ( whose name inexplicably escapes me at the moment.) All sharing of their knowledge, and it was that knowledge that I myself first learned how to perform electrolysis.
When you have high profile electrologists doing this kind of PR work for an industry there is bound to be personal conflict amoungst that group, but it also does a lot to elevate the professional reputation of those electrologists in the eyes of consumers. But for every 1000 awesome consumers that come along, comes one or two who would qualify, as not so sane. And these people, honestly are dangerous to your reputation as an electrologist. We’ve all had them, that one really bad client. So when these people are rejected often they lash out at those who tried to help them. We’ve seen it with Josepha with a woman from france, and that person attacked me as well, and to this day has my comments to her ravings posted from here on hairtell on her private blog to “shame” both josepha and I. Michael bono a few months ago reminisced with me about one who had snuck into his home, to catch him in some unspeakable act that had never occurred . James had one from germany. Recently Adrienne had one here openly attacking him on hairtell ( and all over reddit and other places on the internet) and stalking him still to this day . Just as much as we help the careers of these participating electrologists their fame here, can used as a tool to attack and harrass them. We’ve seen it time and time again, and I’m certain my really crazy nutcase is right around the corner too ( so far I think Deedra and I have been lucky) . I feel like you do, and wish they would all share of their knowledge for even more generations to discover and learn about electrology, but for most of us, there is an element of risk associated with our presence here on hairtell and that risk is taken on, without any reward or compensation, just knowing we did a good thing.
What a shame. 
Hope one day we become more resilient and learn how to effectively manage/cope with Cyberbullying, yet it’s some times detrimental to our mental health.
Some will say that I am saying too much here, but I assure you that this is only a tiny fragment of what I could say on the subject.
This is beyond “CyberBullying”. This encompasses professional jealousy, alongside the fact of being high profile makes one open and vulnerable to slanderous attacks with little options for defense and the higher profile you become, the easier it is to be targeted by all comers.
In the early days, there were practitioners in the industry who vilified this site by saying, “Who died and made Andrea and James the spokespersons for the industry?” and “What gives you the right to answer those people’s questions?” Our reply was always, “Feel free to volunteer YOUR TIME to help the public out and lighten our load. We are just the people who care enough to DONATE our time for the good of the world.”
When they could not destroy this community from the outside, many chose to join it and try to destroy it from the inside.
Every high-profile person in the industry, regardless of having any relationship to this site or not, has had to deal with slander and professional sniping. Make some discovery that could change the way the work is done for the better? If you try to share it for the benefit of the industry and the customers; you will be ridiculed as a fool, “hair-a-tic” and worse. Try to sell classes to teach it, and you are greedy in addition to all that. Keep it to yourself and just do better work on your clients, thus causing people to travel in order to see you for the good work they have heard you do, and you are a liar who is somehow tricking people into believing that something that is not possible is possible.
Crazy clients are not even the worst part of it. Sometimes a professionally jealous practitioner or even cabal of practitioners will direct hand selected crazy clients towards a targeted professional and whisper instructions to their Manchurian candidates and direct things to be professionally steered for maximum damage to the targeted practitioner. Half-truths, some outright lies, and use of the intricacies of the legal system all are expertly used to bury the targeted practitioner under a mountain of muck, and that’s what you get for trying to do good for the most people possible.
One person who finally admitted to professional jealousy after decades of downright evil behavior had been literally contacting any person who publicly identified themselves as my clients and working hard to convince them to cancel their work with me, going so far as to say that as a longtime professional in the business, this professional could say without a doubt that our progress pictures were showing negative outcomes where on the horizon and that I was cheating the client out of their money. This even though there is no way to actually tell what good one has gotten from any hair removal treatment until at least one year after the day of that treatment. This same “professional” told a woman that I was “Icepicking” her upper lip when her post treatment pictures did not even show where we had worked, because she had healed up visually in the standard 24 to 72 hours.
This was the most evil thing I believe this person habitually did, because this person was not looking to steal the client, just make sure that the client didn’t complete their work with me. This person spent their valuable time just trying to convince someone who was happy with their results to be turned away from the positive results they had seen with their own eyes and either quit the project entirely, or just go back to 4 hairs per square inch and move along… for years and years instead of the 18 to 24 months that they had been set up to enjoy with me.
One practitioner was like the James Bond villain in the Batman’s Rogues Gallery sending expendable henchmen/women and not only sent a crazy client my way but orchestrated her in her every move to maximize problems and the piece de resistance was attempting to blackmail me with a sexual assault charge if I did not pay a ransom. The brilliance of this move is that it basically silences me for the duration of the statute of limitations while allowing them the unfettered ability to say and do whatever they want as the putative victim and her secret adviser.
Another practitioner has written so many pages of slanderous words about me that I have been asked by people if this person is my ex-spouse or something. I have to tell them that all that started without us having ever met one time!
So anyway, when you wonder why we can’t get people to donate their valuable time and experience here for the benefit of the clients, the industry and sharing of information, well, I guess it’s the wages. We literally don’t get paid enough here to deal with the side effects of a raised profile. (and just incase I have to say this, we don’t get paid for this at all, other than whatever good karma we give to the world)
Some of us are just insane enough to still care over and above what’s best for us personally and take the slings and arrows anyway.
Now move along folks, nothing to see here anyway.
I felt sorry that this happened to you. Hope karma works fast enough.
Certainty is uncertainty or nothing is certain, but fact will always remain true.
Thank You.
Just remember, the lies have circled the globe twice by the time the truth has put its pants and shoes on.
Furthermore, even if one is acquitted, many will always believe that one was guilty and “got away with it”.
<=====opens can…Well would you look at all those those worms…
James remembers one very “cray-cray” electrologist in Arizona that called me a fat, black woman with no license or any credentials. I hold two licenses and would be very honored to be a black woman, but alas my DNA had other plans for me.
James, welcome back to HairTell. Seana, your words were beautiful and so very special to James and others. We always welcome practitioners to participate here. It is easy to walk away when you are angry, fearful or disgraced, but much harder to still show love to someone when you are attacked. James was here on Hairtell from the very beginning (2002) and he was my mentor when others would not offer any pearls of advice or wisdom. Nice to have you back, brother man.
Special mention goes to Mike Roy of Laurier who passed away in 2018. He was a very special member of our family, that we will always respect and honor.
Oh yes I nearly forgot about her. Surely she cant still be around…Shudders. OMG…I checked…she is. Thanks Dee I’m gonna have nightmares now!
:3
‘Crying out in the wilderness’, I like this phrase; I feel like I can resonate with it.
Wonderfully, I was able to find a copy of The Mood Cure at my library, too! (Some other texts, like Heather Widdow’s Perfect Me have alluded me thus far though.) My summer reading list has definitely gotten pretty big.
.
I wish it wasn’t such a struggle to fight jealousy and bad publicity just for being fantastic electrologists :(. I’m sure journals like mine have been done to death but part of why I decided to do it was that as a consumer posting progress photos, there’s just less for naysayers to harass or to grip onto (like what happened—and luckily was resolved!—in Josefa’s Diary of a European guy thread). I did decide though that even while my electrologist is unnamed, say that they read my journal: I should make sure my discussion there isn’t so in depth as to not make them feel embarrassed by accident ^^;
Isn’t it horrible that some people are such psychos that they enjoy making the world a worse place?
Problem is it only takes a few of them to ruin it for everyone (or most).
Did you know that the razor blades in Halloween Candy is just an Urban Legend that never happened? Some psycho started telling that story, and it scared enough parents that a tradition that had lasted over a hundred years has mostly come to an end.
Ebay has a similar, though smaller problem.
Originally, it was thought that one would need brokers and all kinds of safeguards to insure trustworthy transactions in the Ebay space. Turned out that the average person is actually generally honest. Unfortunately, the psychos come in and give bad reviews, or play deviant games on the platform in order to get free stuff and/or ruin someone’s 100% trust rating and people have their trust scores drop unfairly. This became a big enough problem that Ebay started sunsetting bad reviews effect on one’s ID after a time, because a truly bad person would not get better, but a wrongfully reported person would recover, and a simple misunderstanding would be a one-off thing.
We can’t purge the world from psychos. Even when they die, there’s more to take their place and their legacy continues, because the evil that they have done doesn’t tend to go away.
It wasn’t until many years after his 1933 death that Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s innocence regarding 1921 false accusations against him became common knowledge. Not soon enough to save his career or good name.
The policy here at HairTell has always been to let the discussions go as best we can and allow the community to come to it’s own personal opinions about the information shared here. When there is controversy, it is our hope that people will be able to see the truth shining through the human tendency to try to find darkness in every sunshiny happy place, or thing.
I would like to think that we have succeeded in that more often than we have failed.
That being said, it does nothing to help the fact that rising above the crowd only tends to make it easier for people to throw tomatoes at you. Just show appreciation to those who take that on, because otherwise it’s a thankless task with more negatives than positives.
I can well imagine how these awful experiences would stop you from giving up your valuable time to this forum - to be attacked when you’re trying to help is soul-destroying. So thank you very much for continuing to help us all, professionals and clients alike. I for one really appreciate your time, advice and wisdom. Thank you!