The ubiquity of clairvoyance...

I used to, in my more vocally smart-assed days actually say, (rather than just think,), "How remarkable! You must be clairvoyant, because you knew I was just dying to have your opinion even though I didn't ask you!"
(As I said, "used to," I ain't proud, but that's how I was....)
This is an entire town full of people with such powers.
I am constantly amazed a new at how people make free to come up to the cantors and critique them, give them advice, give them orders... Today, it was one of our youngest cantors, not exactly brimming over with self-confidence, and the busy-body in question was wrong. The pastor, the head of the LitCom, me or any priest at the Mass at which he is presiding, I told him he had to at least give some thought to listening to, anyone else he could blow them off as graciously as he wished.
I wonder if PIPs go up to the head of the lay reader corps to tell her about mispronunciations that have been made at Mass....?
I get a great deal of advice and have actually learned to smile through most of it.
Sometimes I agree with a criticism completely and says so, with the addendum, why don't you tell Fr. Pastor, or Mrs. Head of LitCom?
You should see the sheer terror on the visage of my erstwhile advisers.
Apparently, people are in fear of them, but I'm not intimidating enough.
But the fact is, nearly every week I am told that I am both too slow and too fast, that I program too much new stuff and the same things all the time, there is too much music making Mass too long and that we never finish the hymns...
The only consistent complaint is "too loud" but the fact remains that the louder I play the louder people sing, and the main lodger of this charge doesn't seem to be able to hear the organ as he is seldom with it, so I'm at a loss how to deal with it.

One participant in the retreat/seminar at Mundelein says he always asks complainers to climb up on the bench and show him how it ought to be one.... :twisted:
I've never tried that although I did tell someone she was welcome to sing or play anything she wanted when I felt I could not in good conscience program one of her favorites, as well as to provide me with transpositions that were to her liking..