As usual, my husband and I take turns on our responses to things. Although we do work as a team, we each have our own ways of stating things, and we like to put them out their our own way sometimes. This is one of those cases.
My response to all of this -
First, with regards to Mr. Young's phone call to Cathy Elrod at Repticon. Cathy and I have communicated through this ordeal, and she called me after speaking to Mr. Young. She had a very valid point to me - the Repticon team is just that - a TEAM. Why, if Billy straightened things out with Mr. Young would he NOT mention this to Cathy when she spoke to him about posting on this thread? Why would he even want to have a post on here with their situation if it was straightened out? This makes no sense to Cathy, or to me, and our only thinking is that maybe that phone call did not happen. Neither of us have proof of that, it is PURELY speculation, but Cathy IS going to find out from Billy. Just food for thought.
Secondly, the fact that Mr. Young said to Cathy that he would be emailing Kathy Love immediately says something to me. Why, if he was trying to straighten things out, would he go back to Kathy, and not pick up the phone or email US? He wants things straightened out, then go to the source. It appears to me that he is just once again pulling on Kathy's HUGE heart strings to twist things around in his favor. I say again, DEPLORABLE on his part.
Now my response to Mr. Young's claims AGAIN.
1. The phone calls he claims happened DID NOT HAPPEN. At least not after the first call. That is about the only truth in what he says happened in that call however - that it happened at all. All of the details of what I say happened in that call have already been spelled out way back in this thread, so I will not repeat them, but we agreed on $750 from the very first phone call. He is correct that we spoke about the fact that it is a start-up show, and that it was taking place the same weekend as Tinley Park. The reason this was mentioned mainly was because Mr. Young said he already committed to being there, and that he would ship us materials to set up about a week before the show to help advertise the business, and I agreed to this. He also DID say that he wanted to do whatever he could to help out a start-up show with people that had the same values as he did about the reptile community. Most of our stance can be found on our webpage about how we feel about this.
2. I never called Mr. Young back asking for $750 because the show was costing more than I expected. Before ever talking to Mr. Young about the show (or anything else for that matter), a budget was worked out for the show, the hotel was booked, I had my numbers in order. Mr. Young's money was to be used in part to help cover some costs, but not for the main part of the show. We were hoping to be able to do extra advertising, and maybe some other events/promotions for the show OUTSIDE of the regular show finances. We (speaking as Kordek's Kritters) have a business account at our bank, and the money to cover the expenses for the show has been in place for awhile. We did not need Mr. Young's money for those things, it was to HELP cover things that we would not be able to do ABOVE and BEYOND the regular show expenses (the hotel rental, etc). The fact that my husband and I just got married on May 3rd, and that we have 5 children was IRRELEVANT to the business side of things, and I have NEVER used this excuse to justify anything in my life financially. Business is business, personal is personal, and we keep our finances this way as well. This phone call never happened, plain and simple.
3. Mr. Young did mention to me that he sponsors several other shows, but never mentioned which shows, nor his agreements with those shows. This was mentioned simply because I asked what his agreements were with other shows, how he "normally does things", to which he responded it varies show to show. This happened on the very first call we ever had, and was never mentioned again. So this phone call that Mr. Young said happened, did not happen. Neither did the phone call after.
4. I find it very interesting that so many of our transactions happened by phone according to Mr. Young, but he found it necessary to email his response to back out of the deal. Why change the pattern of communication at that point? And if he decided an email was good enough at that time, why did he not contact me again since I did not respond? Again, I say it is because that email was never sent.
5. Yes, I did state publicly that he was difficult to get in touch with. I have also stated that most of the times I tried to speak to him and actually got him on the phone, the conversations were short and sweet, as he was always too heavily involved in things with FedEx accounting issues, or personal things (such as his girlfriend moving into his apartment, or commitments with his daughter). I always told him to call me back "later" when things straightened out, however, he never returned those calls. Also, if we had so many phone conversations, why did I state many times in my emails to him that I had been trying to reach him for days, and that I had been leaving messages on both numbers I had available to me?
Mr. Young, I have asked you several times, both privately and publicly, to forward me any missing emails you may have regarding our transaction. If you choose not to forward them to me, please forward them to someone who has the knowledge to prove the validity of that email, as I did earlier to Dennis Hultman.
As far as his blatant insults of Fauna BOI and its members, he did not do as well as he thought in hiding it as he thought he did IMO. He can apologize to Kathy and THROUGH Kathy to "those he respects", but still hints at his feeling that the BOI is a joke. Not a smart move for ANYONE, and I would say that if I was not directly involved in this thread as a party who was wronged.
At this time, we still have not received any communication from Mr. Young.
Kelly Kordek