Most of us received the letter from gather.com telling us basically that (a) we didn't make the final 20, and (b) they will do this again. I know most of us are tired and disappointed. Some of us are glad we got involved in the contest even though we didn't win. Others of us are not. Some contestants are so far from glad that they never want to even think about gather.com again.
I'm glad I entered, but I feel strongly enough about the many flaws in the contest that I would like to offer some heartfelt words of advice to gather: Fix some things before you do this again. I would like your help as fellow contestants in figuring out what needs to be changed. I have written a rough draft of an open letter to gather.com. I would like your opinions on it before I send it out further. The letter now says:
Dear First Chapters Administrator: I participated in the first round of the First Chapters contest. I'm glad I did, even though I did not advance. Nothing I'm about to say should be taken as in any way minimizing the accomplishments of the 20 people still in the running. They worked hard, both in writing their novels and in promoting those novels.
However (you knew there had to a however, didn't you), I think there were several flaws in the contest that should be fixed and probably can be fixed before you try this again.
Flaw one: An overwhelming and highly variable number of chapters were available for reading, making getting found by readers the overwhelmingly most important factor determining success in the contest.
An idea to fix it: If you run this contest again I would strongly suggest that you (a) Set an upper limit to the number of entries (say 500 or maybe even 1000). Entry number 501 (or 1001) and subsequent entries would go on a watiing list for the next contest if the would-be contestant so desired. (b) Require that all entries be in your hands before the contest begins. (c) Put entries on line for viewing periods on a regular and scheduled basis. For example, let's say that you allow up to 500 entries and run the contest for 11 weeks. At the beginning of week 1, fifty entries go up. At the beginning of week two 50 more go up. That way every entry has a week somewhere on the first 2 screens of entries, and another week further back. The 500 and the 50 aren't magic numbers. They could be 750 and 75. I think that much more than that would take us back to a situation where readers are overwhelmed.
Flaw two: This was overwhelmingly a popularity contest rather than any real indication of quality. All of the members of the top 20 selected by the popular vote came with large 'fan clubs', most of whom joined gather.com, signed on one day, voted, and never even signed on again. That popularity contest aspect also had the downside that unless your fraud detection mechanisms are extremely good, people could create "virtual friends" if they had access to more than one computer.
Idea(s) to fix it: I understand that part of the reason for the contest was to draw new members to gather. At the same time, having people join and sign on once to vote doesn't help gather much, and it makes the contest results much less credible. How about this: restrict voting to 'active' gather members. In other words, in order vote you need to have done a certain amount of the things gather.com wants you to do on gather within a certain period of the vote. You could set it up so that a friend could join, comment, and rate, but the rating would not count in the person's total until the friend participated in gather.com enough to earn a certain number of gather points. That would keep the 'fan clubs' down to a dull roar, make it harder to win by creating a bunch of 'virtual friends', and give gather.com a boost by giving the friends an incentive to get involved rather than just showing up once to vote. It might also minimize the drive-by ones because friends of a contestant would have to do a mimimum of other things before their low ratings would count.
Flaw three: Drive-by ones. You did demonstrate the ability to get rid of them periodically, but the real damage they did was in keeping the rankings from being a real indicator of quality. People were deliberately targetting good entries and trying to keep them down in the pack so that nobody could find them.
Idea(s) to fix it: I don't believe that you should totally eliminate the ability of a person to give a low score, with or without comments. However, I do believe that giving a low rating with no comment should be rare. How might you do that? I'm not sure if this would work with your rating system, but what if you tracked someone's 'kharma'. If they've built up enough kharma by doing useful things (as evidenced by earning gather points) they could give a low rating without commenting. That would deplete some or all of their kharma though, whereas low ratings with comments would not. So what would this do? If you feel strongly that something deserves a low score but fear retaliation you could still give it that score, but you couldn't sit on the high rankings screen handing out ones to all of the high rankers. If you tried that you would quickly run out of kharma.
Flaw four: Earlysuccess snowballed while early failure reinforced itself. The Border gift cards for readers was a great idea, but it pushed reading toward the highly rated material because only perceptive ratings on that material would get rewarded. High ranking chapters got a lot of attention, while many equally deserving chapters got none.
Idea(s) to fix it: Keep the Borders cards as incentive idea, but add in one more provision: On the last day of the viewing period, give each contestant the right to nominate one reader as the most useful commenter on their entry. The reader or readers with the most nominations gets gift cards too. That gives readers incentive to find the entries that have been lost in the shuffle and give them useful comments, which should make the contest more useful for a range of contestants.
Once again, I want to emphasize that I respect the top 20 in the current contest, and I'm glad I entered in spite of the fact that I'm not one of them. I hope this contest becomes regular (quarterly?) event. I also hope that you can implement some or all of the changes described above in order to make it a more useful contest for the contestants and to make sure that as much as possible the best entries make it to subsequent rounds.
Thanks
Dale Cozort
So, that's it. Feel free to comment.
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Comments: 51
---You said: "Entry number 501 (or 1001) and subsequent entries would go on a watiing (sic) list for the next contest if the would-be contestant so desired."
Not a good idea to hold onto entries that didn't make the cut, legal-wise. They should be destroyed/deleted and the contestant should get an email saying as much and good luck getting in their submission in sooner next time.
---You said: "On the last day of the viewing period, give each contestant the right to nominate one reader as the most useful commenter on their entry."
My suggestion would be to randomly select 20 reviewers from ALL the entries, regardless of ranking. This would be easier to manage then trying to add another layer of competition to the competition. It would also encourage people to comment more and not just on the "good" ones.
John G.
Case in point: I made the Nicholls Quarterfinals with a script, top 300/5000 entries -- but the Academy READ THE WHOLE SCRIPT -- and that's what made the difference. And I am fairly confident that TAU 4, my entry, was better written and with a wider appeal.
I just don't have the addresses in my address book; I truly believe if all my 8 or so readers gave it a 10 (one of whom is the producer of Highlander), I still wouldn't have made the next round
vjw
Forget the whole "rolling submission" aspect. One look at the top twenty list will tell you that most of them came from the final days of the contest. There were about 300 First Chapters members when my entry was up. Now there are over 7,000. That changed the playing field dramatically. Also, the rolling submissions fed the problem of entries being targetted by drivebys on their last day. Put them all up together, have them all end together.
But my second suggestion is the most important one. The First Chapters Administrator, or his or her designee, should actually have to respond to legitimate questions and concerns. It's bad enough that most people here who emailed the admin never got a response of any kind. But the fact that yesterday, for hours, entrants were clamoring to know whether the partial list was a hoax or not and no one from Gather bothered to respond is unconscionable. I work on Support for a website with a highly active forum and I guarantee you that stuff like that gets answered in minutes. We may not have the answer the users want, and may not even have a full answer, but we don't just ignore the problem.
I won't be back for another contest. Gather has made it clear that they are not interested in answering their users' concerns. Why then, should I be interested in helping to "build a better Gather"? The internet is a big place and there are many other opportunities to connect to other writers on better managed sites.
I concur with your philosophy but believe popularity is never an indication of quality; in fact, the opposite may be true.
Most pop fiction published today is written on a 3rd grade level (I give you Nicholas Sparks, whom I ran through MS Word.) Apparently American masses are intellectual dullards who prefer cute stories to literature. Europe is entirely different; all of my positive responses come from readers in England, Ireland and Germany.
The Irish screenplay writer and famous British actor told me to move across the pond - that I will succeed there. Thus, rather than dumbing down my work or trying to change low American standards, I will go where there are higher ones.
PS: That said, I love my country and the foundation upon which it was built. Unfortunately, that foundation has crumbled and left in its place a corroded, corrupted, decaying edifice. The demise of music and literature is just a tangible representation of a putrification occuring on a political and economic scale.
If anything needs to be fixed, it's the raters. Penalize the contestants that solely travel to the other stories and give low ratings just because they want to win. I've seen a very good story (and not just my opinion either) have a high rate, but suddenly drop below 6 because they were slammed by the drive by's. I think something needs to be done about the drive bys, but I also think that any contestant that is reviewing and rating, that doesn't give VALID reasons for a low rate, should be penalized on their story. Just as I feel those that sit in other peoples reviews and call another member names etc because of their honest opinion, should be penalized.
I saw a lot of that and it was almost enough to make me want to pull my book and walk away. I actually considered it.
This is supposed to be a professional thing here. Submitting to professionals to have our beloved story published. We've spent months, sometimes years, writing, shaping, molding, and to our eyes, perfecting. Yet I've seen some of the most childish and immature behavior by so called adults that it's enough to make me sick.
This is what needs to be fixed, not the rating system. I think if somebody is doing nothing but giving bad reviews or low rates for the sole purpose of lowering the rates, then that rater should be penalized. Just as I feel the contestants who do nothing but horrible name calling, putting the writer or other raters down should be kicked out of the contest because obviously, they aren't mature enough to handle it. This should be a learning experience for everybody. Yes, we all want to have our book published, but we will not all make it, so the other advantage of a program like this is to learn where we can make improvements. And when you have somebody tell you that you just aren't good enough, it makes potentially good authors want to give up. I know, there was a point I asked myself why I bothered. This is not contructive critisism, this is painful to a person who has worked so hard to acheive their goal. I saw one chapter where I know the writer is a high school english teacher. All you had to do was read the review he left for me and that was obvious. Yet some lady told him his writing was below high school level and he was probably some high school punk paying his friends $10 to vote high for his story. This was an actual post. That's absolutely deplorable in my opinion.
Again, it isn't the rating system that needs to be fixed, but the raters. And the best way to stop that is to penalize them when they are so cold and cruel even to the extent of tossing their immature little butts out of the contest. If they can't act mature in a professional contest, what publisher is going to want to work with them? Do you think publishers are babysitting services? No, they are proffesional business. These contests should be treated the same as going to a job interview. Would you act that way at a job interview? Would you act that way if you were submitting to the publisher directly? No, so why should they be allowed to do that in a contest of this nature. They shouldn't. Plain and simple.
Secondly, my next thing would be that if a person hasn't done something as simple as run a spell checker or grammar checker for basic mistakes, they not be allowed to submit. Just tossing a story together and say, "this isn't a spelling contest or grammar contest" shouldn't be acceptable. If we submitted that crud to a publisher, they wouldnt' give us a second look. Now I'm not talking grammar mistakes that are just things a writer didn't know about. Such as, I didn't know about Tom Swifties until you told me. You'd be surprised how many authors I've talked to that didn't either. but I'm talking about serious grammar and spelling errors. There was one story I read that only two paragraphs didn't have either a spelling error or grammar error and they were only one line sentences. That's it. Something like that was tossed together and tossed in the competition and if that is the best a person can write, then it shouldn't be submitted. There should be at least a minimum standard that is acceptable. Some errors are to be expected. We're learning, but an entire chapter of nothing but errors is carrying it too far.
Anyway, that's just my opinion.
I think you are doing a good thing. I agree about the limited number of entries but I dont think they should keep them. Just limit the entries they need to be there by such and such a date and if they arent then too bad.
I disagree with the raters being the problem. I worked very hard to read ALL the submissions I could not just the higher ranking ones. And I know you Dale did too I would go to an entry that had 10 comments and 1 would be yours or Chandra's or Ian or one of the other raters.
I do very much agree that only active gather members should be allowed to vote.
Send it off Dale. I am behind you 110% and I hope you plan to enter again next year.
Lori
Idea(s) to fix it: Disqualify contestants from voting and commenting on the entries. If there aren't enough readers who aren't contestants, then you don't have a real contest.
Flaw six: The readers were not a representative cross-section of the Gather community (and by extension, were not a fair representation of the reading public). For some reason, most Gather members didn't get involved in the contest (at least not the last two weeks). Most readers who weren't contestants were temporary "fan club" members.
Idea(s) to fix it: Start the contest at the Gather groups level. Let the groups pick their favorite entries and then let the whole Gather community vote on these "finalists." (Details of this would need to be worked out by Gather.) Give more and better incentives for rating and commenting.
I think "ratings" should be eliminated. If a reader is too illiterate to write at least three or four cogent paragraphs in the comments, then that "reader" is not going to buy books or remain a gather.com member for long. In other words, that "reader" is not a potential asset to Gather. So, why not eliminate votes and ratings? Intelligent comments usually accompany good entries, and that will force Gather staff to focus more on those. Also, a very well written chapter with only a handful of constructive comments would get equal attention. If Gather must keep ratings, then entrants should not be allowed to cast votes on their competitors.
There was one entrant who accused me of giving him a 1, even though I hadn't yet written my comments and hadn't voted! He sent mean, paranoid e-mails to me, accusing me of cheating, etc., and still, I never voted on his chapter, even after that! (I left extensive comments on many chapters but very rarely voted.) If entrants weren't allowed to vote, lunatics wouldn't leap to false conclusions so quickly. (If I were involved in a vote- rigging conspiracy, don't you think my OWN chapter would have reached Round 2?) The whole thing defies common sense.
So, Dale, give us a chance to read. Continue to get different opinions on contest procedures. Give us a chance to heal. Thank you for writing an article that reveals the raw emotions that most contestants are feeling now.
You might want to even wait until the contest is over before sending the email. That way the Gather folks can give it their undivided attention....
Just a thought.
Of course, it's the fault of the readers, not her prose, that made her fail. The thought of her erudite and superior prose being, in actuality, boring as watching snails copulate has not occured to this intellectually superior being.
However, it begs the thought, if she is so talented and intellectually stimulating, erudite and cosmopolitan, why exactly is it that she has entered her writing in a FIRST TIME AUTHORS contest? Can it be that her scribblings are just so much pompous hot air and that even potential publishers are put to sleep trying to wade through her torturous metaphors and convoluted, contortionist attempts at plot?
One can but speculate.
That's what I am, a reader. If only contestants were allowed to rate and comment, I wouldn't be here. I don't post articles, but I do make an effort to comment on most everything I read, and to contribute in that way to the Gather community.
My ideas are biased towards the raters/readers. I don't believe that anyone with an entry should be allowed to rate any entry, including their own. Period. They should be allowed to comment, but not rate. That would apply for the entire entry period.
Secondly, do not allow any rating without a comment. This won't eliminate the DB1's, but at least you'll have a name to put with the 'it's crap' comments.
Next, run simultaneous contests for the various genres, with one grand prize winner out of the winners in each genre. This will eliminate the 'ick I hate sci/fi' crowd, as well as those who believe only low-rent readers read romance.
I like the idea of randomly presenting chapters for review, as long as the reader has the option to pass without commenting or rating, and get a different chapter. Any number of times, I refused to comment on something, just because I didn't want to waste 30 minutes slogging through something awful, or say something mean.
I also believe no rater's rating should count toward a vote tally unless they have rated AND commented on at least 5 separate entries, or until they reach a minimum number of Gather points. That will eliminate the 'one-shot shooters'.
As a reader only, I also would like the authors to be able to choose the 'winning' commenters. If the person for whom you are providing comments also holds your fate in his/her hands, it would lead to more reasonable comments, and a greater effort in providing input of value. It's not a book deal, but there's still money on the line for me. The way the contest is currently set up, the only shot I had of 'winning' was to comment on chapters that already looked like winners themselves. I had no way of being a 'winner' myself, only by being a parasite on someone else's win. I don't think authors should vote on only their own commenters, but on any commenter they like or find of value.
I agree that you should wait until after the contest to send this, or at least until after this current round. Thanks for providing the 'Cheers' of the first chapters contest!
Anyway, I'd also like to say that I'm discouraged by the attitude of, "We tried to tell them before and they didn't do anything, so don't bother telling them again." First, we really don't know what Gather is discussing or considering, as they've remained pretty silent through this whole thing. (And yeah, I don't think that's very professional, either, but it's beside the point.) Second, it's an awfully defeatist attitude. If you want to be heard, you have to keep talking.
Keep doing what you're doing, Dale.
Thanks for composing the letter. It has a lot of good points. I agree with the others who have suggested that a randomizing approach be used for the articles. This is much like the shuffle mode of the IPOD and should be easy for Gather to implement.
There also needs to be a way for readers to find particular entries. Somewhere, there should be a list of all the current entries, along with their URLs, current rating and number of comments. Round 2 has at least the list and the URLs; this will be the place I go to find the chapters.
Third, definitely agree that votes and comments should be tied; anonymous votes do nobody any service.
Thanks for kicking off this conversation; these kinds of comments have been mentioned in many places, including in a couple of articles and comments I have made, but it is good to gather them in one place.
I'd also like to see international writers included. Maybe they can get an international publishing house to represent them.
The reason they stripped the points and comments was that five of them weren't the top scorers but the editors choice and that would be giving them an unfair advantage over the others, as many of us believe that in the end, it will be an editors choice that wins. Besides, some of those comments were nightmares...people throwing hissy fits.
I think you should send the letter. I think we all should send something. As long as its well informed and not angry and bitter.
For example: I know that Dream Wars got well over 200 ratings and was in the 6.x range. I had it, and a couple of other high rated chapters similar to mine in tabs on my browser so I could refresh once in a while and hijack their good reviewers. (All that and I still ended up in the second or third 100). Oh well.
In any case, I know that the top 100 list missed at least that one, and almost certainly the murder how-to chapter, and probably Archie Cleebo. Those are just the ones that stand out in my mind, but with the drive-bys hammering high-ranked entries toward the end of the viewing period, several of more of them were probably pushed off the first page.
You recognize a flawed system and place blame where blame should be placed. The world could use more people like you.
And I am proud to call you my gather friend.
I do really feel for the people in the unofficial list's top 20 to 30 that didn't make it out. They really had their hopes raised and then crushed. I also feel for the people with almost no comments and the ones who didn't think to save their comments before the chapters came down.
All: I'm by no means defending the First Chapters people when I say this, but it is pretty obvious that they were totally overwhelmed by the number of people in the contest. I'm guessing that they were expecting a little over 200 contestants, with the outside possibility of 300 or 400.
The way they had it set up would have probably worked out okay for say 300 contestants. The contest ran for 10 or 11 weeks, so with 300 contestants there would probably never have been more than 60 or 70 chapters up at a time. That's three or four pages worth, not an overwhelming number. A good reader could at least read the first couple of paragraphs of all of those chapters, and find the good ones.
The ratio of readers to chapters would have been favorable enough that the fan clubs would have had less influence. The gather people could also have gone through all of the entries in finding their 5. It would have probably worked out reasonably well. With 300 entries, the top 15 would have meant the top 5% made it to the next round.
If the First Chapters people are smart, they are probably kicking themselves for specifying 20 people rather than a percentage of total contestants. If they had said that the top 5% of contestants went into the next round, and they got to choose another 2%, then they would have been far better off. That would have meant roughly 125 entries going into the second round, which would have probably been enough to get most of the really competitive entries into the next round.
That would have made the first round kind of a preliminary round to get rid of the stuff that really didn't have much going for it, with the real competition starting in the next round. The cynic in me also realizes that since most of the eliminated contestants aren't going to stick around to watch the next round, having a higher number of contestants there would undoubtedly mean more eyeballs for gather to sell to advertisers.
They could probably still do something like that, with some kind of consolation prize contest for the next 100 or so entries and the reward for the top 5 being some amount of Borders cards, plus the publicity from being a winner. On the other hand that might tend to overshadow the top 20, and the top 20 do deserve their weeks in the spotlight.
I like your letter Dale, but I'm always wary of making too many suggestions about a computer program that I don't know - I don't know what the limitations are, and sometimes it's easy to feel ignored when someone doesn't respond to suggestions fo the impossible. But there must be some ideas, in the letter or in the comments above, that they could use next time.
I liked the idea of entries passing a group stage before the open competition, as long as it could still be advertized outside gather. And I like the idea of getting rid of rolling submissions, since the number of readers changed dramatically during the competition, and the average ratings likewise.
Thanks for putting this together Dale.
I have to (respectfully) disagree with you. In your post, you said:
" Flaw five: Most of the readers were also contestants. Even the most gracious competitor will be partial to his/her own entry and unable to be as objective as non-competitors. Some contestants will be vicious and play dirty, sometimes in subtle ways that undermine the integrity of the contest.
Idea(s) to fix it: Disqualify contestants from voting and commenting on the entries. If there aren't enough readers who aren't contestants, then you don't have a real contest."
Most of the thoughtful, insightful comments I received on my entry were from other contestants; likewise, despite my having been a competitor, I feel I offered honest feedback to other authors. To disqualify potential readers simply because they have an entry in contention doesn't make sense to me.
Nuff said about that.
Dale,
Thank you for your initiative in writing this. You make some extremely good points about what went wrong with this competition and how to (potentially) fix it. Nice job!
Rita :o)
P.S. to Mark Y.: Get over it already. You lost. Deal with it. You don't see the rest of us (or most of us, at any rate) carrying on. It's childish and I'm almost embarrassed for you. But basically, I'm just so sick of your whining.
But I do think this contest would have to be wildly overhauled for it to produce the best winners - and I don't think I would participate again.
There's something very wrong with this, don't you think? I know the later entries in general got more votes - but the editor's picks are late entries too?
Somebody tell me I'm wrong about this. But it really is a problem if all of the winning entries save one were posted 3/1 and later. And how many of them were posted the last week?
I got roughly 60 ratings by a relentless campaign of asking the people with good comments from other entries to look at Char. If I had been smarter and started that campaign earlier I might have gotten into the 90 to 100 total ratings range.
That still wasn't anywhere close to enough to win. And no matter how good my entry was, there was no way it could have done much better than that given the timing of when it was put up for viewing. I had one day near the bottom of the first screen, then I was buried, first on screen four or five, then on screen 8 or 9. If I hadn't done the e-mailing I would have ended up with around 15 ratings, mostly from friends and family. That is totally independent of the quality of the story. If I had waited 2 or3 days to enter the story it would have gone up on a Friday and if it had happened to be on the first couple of pages, it would have sat there accumulating ratings the entire weekend with no effort on my part.
I'm starting to sound bitter, and I'm really not. I got excellent comments, and Char is already a far better story because of those comments. I got to interact with a bunch of dedicated writers, and if they don't all go off in a huff (which I wouldn't blame some of them for doing, by the way) I could see a strong ongoing writer's community forming on gather.com, which would really help most of us, especially people like me with no contact with other local writers.
The top 20 really aren't that bad, and some (though by no means all) of the people are very nice. I'm going give the contest the benefit of a lot of doubts, stick around and hope that gather learns from the mistakes of this time around and tries this again with a much different set of rules.
From my own experience, reading a ton until I left the country, I'd only read three of the winning entries. Two of them I read when I got back to the States, because they were popular (Sea of Movement and Tracks).
I'm all about getting feedback, and I have really enjoyed meeting other writers as a result of this contest, but otherwise, I think this whole thing is problematic, and that's putting it diplomatically. I don't have any sense that it's about finding the best writing; I think it's a cynical play to increase page clicks and publicity.
I received a reply - and actually engaged in correspondence with - the gather staff on the rating system, and learned enough to realize that I had completely misunderstood it before. That is not to say I really understand it now, but I do realize most of the comments on the rating system are based on a flawed understanding. The problem is, were that understanding made clear, then it would once again be easy to fix the system. And I also think that gather would do themselvea a favor by making this conversation public, rather than private.
And my final comment will not be popular: while geniuses don't like to hear this, I'm afraid that a big part of being a successful author is getting out the votes!
So I applaud the idea of writing a letter to gather on the competition, and identifying suggestions for improvements. There are many good ones above, keeping votes secret and disallowing sorting by number of votes, and simultanteous posting of chapters among them. But I don't think that writing a letter of criticisms will be very helpful.
Wow Lisa. I can't either, and I remember thinking about picking those out at some time. I'd only read two of the winners. In this gig, early in means early out and for good.
Uh, not in this way. They send in a publishable manuscript to an agent or publisher. After that, they get help getting out the PR on the book. That's a whole lot different than this forum shilling campaign like we see from one contestant. Join in early January, write 76 articles all about your potential entry, then enter it and get hired mid-stream? If that isn't manipulation of the system I've never seen it.
Now maybe Gather screened out or gave minimal weight to that kind of astroturfing at the end. It still had an impact in that given the number of contestants (35 pages worth at one point) getting a high ranking was the only way to get noticed if you weren't on the first couple of pages and you weren't willing to do massive spamming campaigns. It was impossible to stay on the first page in terms of rankings for more than ten or fifteen minutes unless you brought a cheering section. I know. I got there a few times and always got hit by enough ones to push me back down within a very short time.
The root problem in my opinion was simply the overwhelming number of entries compared to the number of people who were going to go on. This setup would have worked fine for 200 or 300 entries. With 2500 or more it simply broke down, and the people in the remaining 20 are essentially just the best of the entries that happened to be on the first four or five screens over a weekend or in the last viewing period where they stayed there for up to two weeks.
I'm was and am a little bitter about that, but this was the first time Gather had done this sort of thing for novels, and I can see why they might have underestimated the response and been swamped by it. Hindsight on that doesn't help at this point for this contest. Analyzing what happened and figuring out ways to give contestants a more even break next time is perfectly reasonable, and they should do it.