Again, to clarify a couple of points that have now been brought up....

It was never the intent of the original posting in this thread to discredit Bernie personally or call his business practices in general into question. What was stated were the facts of one specific incident for which I was seeking clarification. I had provided Bernie, via e-mail, ample opportunity to provide clarification in this matter in a public and proactive manner. When he chose to not respond, I posted the facts of this issue on this forum, though not to discredit, but hopefully to elicit response. Unfortunately, while Bernie did respond, he did so in a rather defensive manner, never really getting to the issues at hand, which remain still. Nonetheless, I can say that, aside from this singular incident, in my very limited communications with Bernie I have also found him to be knowledgeable and straight-forward.

I am in no way trying to (nor am I suggesting that others should) imply that this is a "where there's smoke there's fire" type of issue. I have my own underlying speculations that I've derived from this set of facts and others may very well develop their own as well. I also strongly feel, however, that any such speculation should remain tucked away in one's own imagination and not bandied in public as if it were pseudo-fact.

In closing, I also wanted to take this opportunity to publicly thank Tom Jacobsen for coming forward, after having been unceremoniously "outed" in Bernie's posting. In respect for my colleagues' privacy, I made it an intentional point in my original posting not to list the names of the other individuals involved, a courtesy that Bernie apparently did not seem to be willing to extend to his customers. As such, once the cat was out of the bag so to speak, the posting of Tom's e-mail this morning did serve two purposes in that it validated that my original posting was not the complete pack of lies that is was made out to be, but more importantly, Bernie did finally make a phone call to Tom after this was posted on the forum. To this I offer a sincere, "Thank You Bernie!" along with a challenge that if you have still not done the same with Steve and David, that you make all haste in doing so.

Regards,