Well, they sure lost THIS elder. How nice not to have have the pressure on to kiss arses and lick boots.
Re calling Brooklyn: I did it all the time, from Texas, and nobody ever hassled me about it. I especially got a kick out of listening to Kingdom Melodies on hold (on my nickel).....except one time I was hassling HQ about their strict policy of not combining English and Spanish language groups so that there could be a congregational setup more typical of the mixing of cultures and languages in the Borderlands rather than keeping the groups rigidly segregated in the KH. I guess I called them so much one day the English CO and the Spanish CO came to town together to check things out and politely (they WERE nice about it) informed me that HQ prefers that I go through them -- the 2 CO's -- instead of calling Kingdom Melodies on Hold.
I thought that was great...I finally GOT to them and had some results in the bilingual situation (very small results, like treats thrown to the dog).
In another post I'll get on the bandwagon about the amazingly short-sighted organizational crap I waded around in as I tried to have some more SUBSTANTIAL influence on WTS's linguistic and cultural policies.....
Anyone in other countries have experiences about this intercultural phenomenon in their area? Aborigine-English, Spanish-French, German-Italian, Urdu-Hindi, etc etc etc?