This Friday’s comedy post is courtesy of Daniel Flöckinger, the electronic communications ‘expert’ who recently frightened himself and others by reading comments he had previously posted to Commsrisk only to assert they were written by an imposter. Not content with behaving like a fool in public, he followed up by sending me an email containing the usual threats and complaints. I always find this kind of behavior odd, because everybody should know that:
- I publish every email which contains any threats, in order to make the sender seem as petty and ridiculous as they invariably are;
- I really like transparency, and this case is no exception; and
- by publishing empty threats, I want everybody to see why they should never give in to the bullying which many people complain is rife in this industry.
So here is what Flöckinger had to say for himself.
From: Daniel Floeckinger ARES
Subject: Your article.
Hello Eric!
Why does he open with an exclamation mark when threatening legal action? I have never even met this man. I hope his lawyers do a more professional job when they send me their threatening letters.
I do not really know what you wanted to achieve with your recent article about me.
I thought the purpose was obvious. The article made fun of somebody so vain or so deceitful that he took the words he posted to the internet and behaved like somebody else was pretending to be him.
Good Journalism is not about rumors or spreading such.
There were no rumors in my piece. Flöckinger posted some batshit crazy stuff on the internet, and I wrote a piece which quoted his words after he decided to delete them. And I know the real Flöckinger posted the batshit crazy comments because he wrote me an email telling me ‘off the record’ that he posted the comments.
It is also not about your personal opinion.
Obviously this man has never heard of an op-ed. Not that it takes much effort to reach an opinion on Flöckinger, who has the cheek to call himself a liar in public, then insists that quoting him is deceitful.
It is about finding out what really happened. It is about finding out the truth.
I did find out what happened. It was really easy to find out what happened because it involved reading words posted on my own website. Flöckinger posted some words on Commsrisk and later I repeated them. And then I repeated the ‘off the record’ email he sent to me. That all happened. It really, truly happened, even though Flöckinger was embarrassed by what happened so deleted everything that was publicly visible, then wrote new comments that inaccurately described the contents of the comments he had deleted, trying to distract any readers from how weird it is to use multiple online accounts and then claim that one of them is controlled by somebody impersonating you.
As the Editor of a forum about Fraud Management, you should follow the highest ethical standards before writing an article and expressing your opinion.
Low-lifes can always be relied upon to cite ethics without any sense of irony. I will file this with the moral lectures I have previously received from Mohammad Ali, from my anonymous cVidya troll and from the phoney baloney event organizers who disappeared before Flöckinger could sponsor their RAFM conference.
Especially when you decide to drag someone thru mud, like you did with me.
Technically, Flöckinger dragged his own name through (sic) the mud. He accused himself of being an imposter. I just repeated his accusation.
The easiest way to clear this situation and to understand what has happened would have been to call me. You know my number. You know where to reach me and you know how to use a phone.
***Flöck off***
When I read a public statement which says Commsrisk has published a series of comments from an imposter, it becomes appropriate to investigate the substance of that allegation. That is what I did. When I found that the allegation was made by a jerk who wasted my time and who lacked the decency to either call me to apologize for his behavior, or to make another public statement withdrawing his false assertion, I resolved to warn others whilst ridiculing him.
Asking me what has happened, would have cleared the situation and would have saved all of us time and nerves.
My nerves are fine. And my time was well spent. I obtained evidence that Flöckinger is a nutjob and/or serial manipulator of the truth, and I used it to craft an article that was unusually popular.
You decided to take your time to write an article about nothing. There is no smoking gun. There is no wrongdoing.
Apart from the false accusation that somebody else was pretending to be Daniel Flöckinger. Though that may represent paranoia rather than wrongdoing. Or perhaps it was an inane attempt to generate attention which backfired horribly. I will settle for either explanation. Madman. Deceiver. Flöckinger can pick the label he prefers, so long as he picks one of the two options.
All i did was to contribute to your forum. Accidently with 2 accounts.
And then used one account to accuse the other account of being fake. Which is the key point that amnesiac Flöckinger keeps forgetting.
Since i, and many other entrepreneurs i have more than one mail account.
I have loads. But I have never once accused myself of not being me.
I assume you also have 2 or 3 or maybe more accounts. One for private, one for this, one for that etc. At your own Platform you also sometimes comment as “Commsrisk Moderator” and sometimes as “Eric”. So much for a “split personality disorder” as you diagnosed me with recently.
Perhaps I should have accused him of delusions of grandeur. How else do we explain why somebody so insignificant thinks other people are pretending to be him?
I did nothing wrong.
This is possibly correct. Mental illness is neither morally wrong nor funny. And only somebody with a mental illness can be telling the truth whilst also imagining their own actions were carried out by imposters.
I commented articles on your page. With 2 accounts but always using my real name. Mistakes happen. And i corrected my mistake. We are all only human beings.
Using your real name is not much use if you publicly assert that the person using your real name is not you. Even though it was you. I have run a website for ten years but this is the first time that somebody accused themselves of being an imposter.
And Flöckinger definitely did not correct his mistake. He deleted all his comments instead. Deletion is not correction. A normal person would have written something helpful like: “oops, sorry, I made a mistake, there were no imposters, please ignore my lunatic ravings.” Flöckinger made his wild accusations seem more credible by deleting all comments from both the ‘imposter’ and the ‘real’ account. That was why I corrected his mistake in full… whilst also making fun of it.
You did what you did. And i will have to defend myself and clear my name from the nonsense and absurd story you created.
The story is 100 percent true, and was created by the really absurd Daniel Flöckinger. Half of the article consists of quotes of Flöckinger. I cannot take credit for creating this fiction; why am I now being told to censor it?
Industry rumors say that you are getting paid for creating negative publicity on someone.
Only a truly pathetic miserable smudge of excrement on a ragged sheet of toilet paper floating amidst a lake of raw sewage would attempt this gambit. Does Flöckinger think I should be nicer to him, for fear that ‘industry rumors’ will damage my reputation? I have deliberately chosen a path where I have least reason to worry about my reputation, because it has been built on mercilessly and repeatedly excoriating scum like Flöckinger.
This nasty little sentence reveals the truth about Flöckinger. He likes to present himself as a plain-speaking honest dealer. So how did Flöckinger discover this new ‘industry rumor’, which so conveniently came to his attention after he embarrassed himself on Commsrisk? He does not say where the rumor comes from. Perhaps Flöckinger knows a whistleblower in the evil corporation paying me to discredit him. Maybe somebody has tapped my telephones in order to determine my machinations. A policeman could have tracked the flow of money into my Swiss bank account. Or maybe this is such obvious bullshit that it only makes the accuser seem even more ridiculous than anyone thought possible. After all, for this supposed scheme to have worked in practice, I must have been paid to discredit Flöckinger and then I waited patiently until Flöckinger wrote a comment on Commsrisk that said somebody else was pretending to be him. Even if I was an evil genius, and I was given a million dollars, I struggle to understand how I could make Flöckinger fall into this trap. Why pay me to humiliate Flöckinger, when he does all the hard work himself?
I assume this is what has happened.
Sure he does. Flöckinger assumes I must be paid to make fun of him. Because he is such a well-loved and highly-respected ‘expert’ that nobody would want to insult him otherwise. Everybody in this industry loves Daniel Flöckinger… apart from the hordes of people who he says are chasing him, impersonating him, vilifying him, and thus jusiftying his paranoia.
And Flöckinger is confident my post is part of a grand conspiracy against him because there is absolutely no evidence of me ever scolding, eviscerating or belittling anyone unless I was first paid money to do so… apart from the last ten years of blog posts where I criticized dozens of people who, unlike Flöckinger, have reputations actually worth criticizing.
Rubbishing Flöckinger’s reputation is like swimming to the middle of the lake of raw sewage, in order to collect one small piece of shitty toilet paper, just so I could bring it back to the shore and flush it down the toilet again. That is why Commsrisk has never bothered to mention this insignificant non-entity before, even though he regularly trolls other RAFM practitioners in a desperate attempt to get noticed.
It would not surprise me if Flöckinger wrote his email in the hope that I would publish it, just to manufacture more attention for himself. Some people say there is no such thing as bad publicity. Flöckinger is the exception that proves the rule.
If not, I really don not know why you choose to write this article which does not meet any ethical nor journalistic standards.
It was funny. And popular. As well as being true.
You dragged me thru mud. For nothing. You have caused damage to my name and my business. Your motivation, only you know.
Funny. Popular. True. Now everybody understands the motivation.
Now, i really need to contact a lawyer to have my name cleared.
Bingo! At long last, here is the lazy idle threat repeated by every jumped-up no-mark who spends too much time on LinkedIn masquerading as a real businessman. They always think that threatening to go to court will allow them to rewrite history and thus spare themselves the ignominy of being associated with their own actions. Flöckinger is not the first to make a threat like this. I doubt he will be the first to follow up his threat with real action.
Unfortunately. The money and energy could have been spent so much better. On both sides.
My legal costs are zero so far. And I expect they will remain zero. Because this threat is hollow, and everybody knows it, including Flöckinger the Fantasist.
You can … and you will publish that. Go ahead. I could not care less anymore..
So I did. He told me to! I guess he really is that desperate for publicity.
