An open letter to skeptics

Dear Skeptics and Haters,

Please allow me a moment of your time while I get something off my chest.

You entered my giveaway of your own free will. I HOPE you read the entire post before you entered. While some did not, I don’t mind sending you a friendly email reminding you of what I need to enter you in the contest. We all miss details sometimes, right? I’m asking for full mailing addresses for the giveaway so I don’t have to track people down afterwards. The first time I ran this giveaway, I didn’t do that. Well, I did, but I let it slide and entered the names anyway thinking I could find out their addresses afterwards. It took me hours of extra work to find these people. They either didn’t reply to my emails or their email addresses didn’t work and my attempts at contacting them came back undeliverable. THIS is why I ask for your mailing information when I have a giveaway. I delete everything after the winners have received their prizes (non winning information is deleted earlier).  It allows you to get your winnings faster and it’s less work for me. Is that so wrong? I work my hiney off putting together a giveaway and then I get an email like the one below. You can only imagine how annoying this is to me.

Person R sent in his/her guesses – no name, no address. How do I even know how to announce the winner? Plaster their email all over the internet? I doubt they’d appreciate that very much.  So I write back thanking him/her for his/her entry and asking for the required mailing info I’d need to send them their prize, should they win. What do I get back? This:

I shouldn’t have bothered. You have my email address. If I “won” you could easily ask for my address then.

This is clearly an attempt to get addresses and emails to use for some other purpose. While underhanded, it’s no more so than what “everyone else” does, so I guess you shouldn’t lose sleep over it.

R

Someone obviously has issues. I’d love to have my former winners, and even those who have entered in the past giveaways but not won,  post a comment explaining if they have EVER received any marketing junk, or any other unsolicited item,  from me in their mail or email. And feel free to do so. But I really doubt it will do this person any good. They’ve already made up their mind that I’m a villain.  LOL

Anyway, I wrote back explaining my reasons and thanked them for being rude to someone who’s only trying to do something nice for the low-carb community. *sigh* Sometimes I wonder why I bother.

Thanks for letting me vent. I hope 99% of the people reading this don’t fall into this category. If you do, then save us both some time and don’t enter. It’s not my loss.

Sincerely yours,

The Alleged Shifty Sheister – who is sleeping wonderfully each night.

UPDATE: Well appearantly R has decided to go public with my shenangans. He/She obviously feels they are justified and must save the world from my evil intentions. Anyone care to give her some facts? Feel free to post at this link ( http://lowcarbdiets.about.com/b/2010/02/08/win-valuable-low-carb-prizes-2.htm) in the comments section. I already have and am waiting for Laura to approve it. I fear this person will just scare potential entries off with this nonsense.  Builds great odds for the rest of you, but not fair at all. And I’m not about to sit by and let this person smear my name and reputation because they are scared to enter a contest I’ve been running successfully for years.

(And no, this person has yet to respond to my email explaining why I do the contest this way.)

UPDATE: All settled! Thanks everyone!