Benchmark Sporthorses?

That Franken-quote is a crime of ellipses abuse.

Anyway, with the seller present to call posters “mean girls”, request their identities, accuse posters of hating her personally, threaten that comments on this forum are responsible for future and past horse seller suicides and the demise of businesses, the stakes are raising a bit too high for me. I’m running away from this thread.

Hopefully the aptly named Final Deception will sail through surgery and recovery, going on to GP and prove the seller right that KS is not a physical limitation. Or maybe he’ll go on to be a famous horsey model. I’d buy whatever that face is selling. Best of luck, Amos, seller, and everyone involved.

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I’m sorry, what? Do none of you actually work in a professional setting with other humans? Do you not have clients?

This is not a $50 sweatshirt sale gone bad, it’s a 5-figure horse sale where the buyer is now faced with expensive surgery and a lifetime of care and/or putting the horse down. You absolutely pick up the phone here, and I say that as someone who would prefer not to talk to other humans but also likes to resolve issues quickly and amicably.

Tone and intent are incredibly hard to read via email or text. It is not a good medium for discussing nuanced and difficult things. Pick up the freaking phone. Have a conversation like humans and adults. After the conversation, send an email detailing what was agreed upon during the conversation and ask the other party to confirm it. This is not hard.

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I work for a multi-billion dollar defense corporation.

My point stands.

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As a professional with literally hundreds of millions of dollars on the line when we do deals, I absolutely insist on written records of communications especially if/when things go pear shaped. Please read my post above about how the ability to go back to a written record is vital to resolution of conflict.

Amos themselves has benefitted from the fact that the pre-sale comms were via text/email and she can refer to them to make her points.

When we do do things via phone call/zoom, 100% of the time I circulate a written summary of the call with all discussions, decisions, and open questions/next steps memorialised and request all participants to confirm or correct the contents thereof. But it’s much easier to just have it happen via written record from go. Then there’s zero chance of ‘Oh, you forgot to summarise this and I forgot you forgot when you circulated the summary.’

Yeah, no one has time for that nonsense.

Insistence that a phone call is the only legitimate reaction is antiquated and, I say this not to be mean but just factually, fairly unsophisticated in today’s world of transactions being conducted across time zones and markets and among people with different language abilities.

If all you have is a phone call, all you have is he said-she said, unless that phone call was recorded. See, also, my example above. The minute I knew this man was shady you could not have paid me to have a phone call with him. Whatever he said, he would have denied later.

Written comms are vital in professional transactions, more so when a lot of money is involved. Good luck proving that you agreed/didn’t agree to or disclosed/didn’t disclose XYZ when all you have on your side is, ‘This is what I said/they said in our phone call!’

Tone and emotion are more unpredictable in verbal comms, too. From the way buyer is talking here (you have no ethics; adults make phone calls; etc. - echoed by you referring to people who prefer written comms as not ‘adult’ and ‘human’) I would suspect getting on the phone with them would quickly escalate into accusations and highly emotional expressions. Better in those cases to stick to something less immediate and emotional like written comms.

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Much more concise than my response and agreed 100%.

We routinely do €1 bn+ deals and my points stand as well.

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Your entire post is spot on.

When we do phone calls/video calls, they invariably are followed with a written summary and almost always recorded and archived. Written communication skips these steps.

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We do do ‘all hands’ calls when there are tons of moving parts in a big agreement - page turns of the document discussing all changes and who will concede what, but those are always followed by another redline of that document - very different from discussing who said what and what each party thinks of a horse’s way of going and behaviour, or a buyer’s experience, etc.

Stuff like that must be via written record or you are screwed, both sides. Buyer here must acknowledge the benefit to her of being able to reproduce comms between herself and seller as she has done so more than once in this thread alone. To simultaneously use those written records to support her claims and yet also insist that only a phone call is legit is disingenuous at best.

It’s also a red flag to me that she keeps saying she left only a very vague message for seller about wanting to discuss this horse, purposefully not giving any further info about what exactly she wanted to discuss. This suggests to me that she was setting up seller, sort of a gotcha situation, admitting she was being deliberately vague about what she wanted to discuss. That to me looks shadier than wanting to communicate via text.

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I agree with this. And Amos has STILL not once made it clear what she wants or if she’s ever actually communicated what that is to Jess. A refund? Vet bill paid? A trade? Just say what you want.

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I don’t work for a corporation. I do big deals. Little old you needs to think outside the corporate box.

20 years ago calls were more frequent but, again, when working across time zones/markets and with varying language abilities, email was king back then, too. Blackberries were all the rage and not for their generally crappy call capabilities.

As someone who conducts her practice in 3 languages routinely, I can tell you I’m way more comfortable reading the one I did not grow up speaking than being on a call with a native speaker who speaks fast, has a regional accent, and/or uses slang that I don’t know b/c I have visited but never lived immersed in that language.

Try not to be so insulting in your discussions. It makes me wonder what ‘multi-billion dollar global corporations’ would hire someone with such belittling communication skills. It also makes me seriously doubt you work across cultures and languages in your ‘global’ work or you would absolutely know that written is standard for multilingual comms.

Just be polite and professional here. No need to fake LOL and call people non-human and non-adult.

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Just for those of us who missed it, @wanderlust mocked me for my POV here making up a fake hashtag for what I was saying and belittling my experience while claiming she has spent 20 years working for multi-billion dollar global companies.

She didn’t want to stand by that written communication so she quickly dirty deleted it.

I could not have made my point about the importance of written comms and preserving them better than she has by being uncivil and then trying to hide any evidence of that behaviour.

ETA: for clarity, she referred to herself as ‘little old me’ in her mocking tone which is why I said ‘little old you’. Just want to make clear that was a reference to her language.

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No, I decided I was done with this thread and didn’t want to get into any more back and forth because it had taken a turn for the stupid.

But you just 100% illustrated my point that it is incredibly hard to read tone in written communication, so thank you for that and the personal insults.

In the end feel very sorry for the purchaser. I feel semi-sorry for Jess that this thread has gone nuts. I hope the horse continues to get the help he needs, which the purchaser seems very willing to give.

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Dang, I missed their post.

It’s me that works for a giant conglomerate corporation. I say that because it’s easier than saying I work for a smaller company that’s owned by Giant Corporation, and spend my days working with and coordinating between private and public customers, domestic and international vendors, customs officials on both sides, shipping and logistics companies (domestic and international), as well as engineers from all nationalities and everyone in between. And that’s just a tiny part of my job.

The world has not operated on a face-to-face or voice based system in decades, especially not when money is involved.

ETA: to be clear, this is all because Wanderlust claimed that text-based communication was unprofessional and not standard vs phone calls. The nuanced answer is: both are used. But written communication is preferred in business for a reason.

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QFP - calling people here who disagree with her ‘stupid’. Add that to not ‘human’ or ‘adult’. Not professional or civil at all. Badly done all around. I’d want to delete that stuff and run away, too.

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I promise her rider sits on plenty of horses who try to unseat her. 'Tis the nature of working with fit young horses and isn’t a red flag in and of itself.

Yes, it would have been ok for you to sell him if you believed it was a training issue and you disclosed it. People find themselves and even their trainers overhorsed all the time.

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Pretty sure I called the thread stupid, not the people. It’s gone way off the rails of the initial post of people asking for opinions on Benchmark, and I was/am done contributing to that.

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No, she claimed she was ‘little old me’ who has worked for 20 years running programmes of some sort for multi-million dollar global corps. She made up a mocking hashtag of my/your points. That’s what I was responding to. It was very belittling and I can see why she deleted it.

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Nope. You said the thread took a turn for the stupid which can only happen b/c of the people posting.

I only posted about the idea that failure to communicate by phone call = bad and wrong.

I feel very sorry for the buyer, for the seller for trying her hardest but not catching what was wrong with this horse in the context of her programme (i.e., not vetting the horses she takes on but evaluating them by eye, thinking improvement with more rides = behaviour issues being worked through, etc.), and mostly for the horse who must be in terrible pain most of his brief life.

No winners here but I think no villains either.

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Absolutely!

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I have been quietly reading along. IMO Amos created a new account from her previous one, searched for threads about benchmark and posted just to rake Jess over the coals.

The actual OP was from months prior. Amos, understandably, is really upset. However from a complete outsiders view they are way out of line. I don’t know if the definition of “pro ride” has changed but I always took that as the horse has major issues which require a big tool box and connections to excellent vets and farriers.

She convinced Jess that this horse was going to a good program. A program she didn’t have any hands on experience with. I don’t blame Jess for not wanting to have a phone conversation because paper trails have always been king. Even before texting and email.

I question Amos’ authenticity on “just wanting to talk” because it’s weird to me that her trainer had to SHOW her why she wouldn’t get back on. I’ve had horses that people didn’t feel comfortable riding and I took them at their word. I didn’t need a demonstration of the behavior. I also will side eye any horse professional that intentionally makes a horse act out the way her trainer did. I wonder if the trainer knows these videos have been posted here.

At the end of the day we have a buyer who convinced a seller that a “pro ride” horse should go to them. The seller definitely screwed up by thinking it was behavioral only but who among us hasn’t trusted our friends or made a bad call with regards to pain vs behavior? This is a learning point for Jess.

I don’t think Amos’ stated conversations with anyone including the vet can be trusted. I’ve had vets tell me what I’m asking for is over kill but they do it anyway. Especially for PPEs.

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I keep checking this thread hoping for updates on how the horse is doing, but am continually disappointed to see so much nasty pointless back-and-forth. Would be nice if those of you that have dug in your heels and continue to go on and on and on would give it a rest. But, well, this is COTH and I know threads will often take a life of their own and there’s nothing one can do but step away when it gets to a point where keeping up with a thread becomes downright frustrating. Shame… because I’d love to hear more about how this lovely horse is doing, if @Amos would provide an update (or better yet, start a new thread).

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