Here’s a little story involving Mark-
Ever since the AxeFX was first announced by Cliff on HRI back in the day, I’ve wanted one. Nearly 15 years ago. I wasn’t in the financial position to get one until recently and it wasn’t just a piece of gear, it was a celebration of finally getting my life together to be able to purchase one. I got a killer Christmas bonus and had enough to get an AxeFX III and an FC, with some left over to set aside.
A few days before the delivery date, I get an e-mail in both my work and personal e-mail addresses from Fractal (so I thought at the time) saying that due to an issue with their ordering system, my AxeFX was going to be shipped to a customer who ordered one before me and due to an production issue, mine wouldn’t be ready until May (this was in December). I was working on a roof, fixing an AC in South Florida, it was about 110 degrees up there with a blinding, white roof, so my attention to detail wasn’t perfect. I just saw the e-mail address was from Fractal Audio Systems, it was worded *flawlessly*.
I fix the AC and head to my office where I jumped on the Fractal forum and made a post about it. Within about 20 minutes, I get a call from someone saying, “Hey, this is Mark from Fractal and I want to discuss this e-mail with you.”. People were already commenting on the post saying it had to be a scam and Matt from Fractal already verified that the e-mail didn’t come from them, so my guard was way up. I told him, “Excuse me for being a little hesitant to believe you are who you say you are.”, he replied, “My name is Mark Day, I work with Fractal....” and I cut him off as I’ve known Mark via HRI/Facebook for well over 15 years at this point. He reassured me that the e-mail was fake and possibly a scam from someone trying to get credit card info or whatnot. Matt Picone ended up helping me as well, it turned into a fucking mess. Fractal blew a bunch of money hiring someone to look into a data breach, my company did the same thing, since it came in to my work e-mail as well. I reset all my passwords, which caused a major fuck up in Outlook and I was locked out of my e-mail (which I NEED to have on 24/7) for about 28 hours.
Around 9-9:30pm that night, my buddy, a dude I’ve called my brother for nearly 20 years and was a groomsman in my wedding two months prior to this, sent me a text saying, “You get your AxeFX yet?” To which I replied, “Dude, I can’t even begin to tell you the day I’ve had involving that” and start telling him all the shit that’s been going on with this scam, how both my job and Fractal were looking into data breaches and this whole mess.
He replies-
“Dude, I thought you’d see the e-mail and call me right away to complain about it. It was just a joke, I can’t believe everyone got so crazy over it.”
It took me a few minutes to respond as I was fucking L-I-V-I-D. When someone on the forum suggested it was a friend pranking me I straight up said, “No one I know would think this is funny. I’ve worked way too hard and have busted my ass so much for this, I couldn’t imagine a single person finding this funny at all.”
My CFO was pissed, Cliff at Fractal was pissed and I was equally dumbfounded and pissed. What made matters worse was that I wasn’t getting my work e-mails, which is how I get most of the work orders at work. CBS is one of our tenants and they had a leak issue in their broadcasting room and because I didn’t get the e-mail, no one took care of it. This was now seriously fucking with my job. When I told my CFO what happened she asked, “So you’re going to get him back, right? I want to help.”
So, I sent my buddy a text at the end of my work day saying, “Well dude, because I was locked out of my email and missed a request to fix a leak in CBS, I’m now fucking suspended from work until my CFO decides if it’s worth keeping me employed or not, so fucking THANK YOU VERY FUCKING FUNNY PRANK HAHAHA SO FUCKING FUNNY OH MAN LOL”
I sent him a picture of my CFO’s business card and told him he better fucking call her the second she gets into work on the following Monday and beg her not to fucking fire me. Over the weekend, I decided that it’d be better to not even tell him it was a prank in return of his idiot prank. The fact that he got my job involved and seriously put me in a fucked up position, I wanted him to never even think to do it again. He called my CFO on the following Monday, told her the whole story and begged her not to fire me over it. She played along PERFECTLY and chewed his ass out and wrapped it up with, “Because Andrew is your friend, we’re not going to press charges. If it were anyone else, we’d be contacting our lawyers immediately. You caused one of our bigger tenants to question our ability to do our job.”
5 months later and he’s still apologizing for it. His logic made no fucking sense at all. The dude sleeps ALL day because he works from 7pm-4am in a bar, there’d be no way he’d answer if I called him when I read the e-mail and why the fuck would I call him before contacting Fractal?!?
So yeah, Mark’s a great dude and relieved a LOT of stress for me that day. I truly hope Parkinson’s doesn’t take too much away from him because he’s such a good human being with tremendous skills, it’d be an injustice to the guitar community as much as it would be to his life.