Last year, or it might have been the year before last, our mailing lists at MailChimp (there’s one for our customers at Ebooks Direct [sure, go to the form at the bottom of the page here if you’re interested in signing up] and one for DianeDuane.com generally [ditto, the form’s at the bottom of the sidebar here]) got big enough that we had to move from MailChimp’s free model to the paid one. So we did, and I didn’t give the issue another thought;Â but at the end of that year, in what I assume is an associated event, something arrived from MailChimp at holiday time.
It was a pair of socks. The socks have MailChimp’s mascot Freddie on them, and I kind of laughed and put them aside as a nice thought. But eventually I wound up wearing them one morning when all my regular socks were in the wash… and was astonished to find that they had some of the best stay-up-ability of any socks I’d ever worn: as good as what until now I’ve been thinking of as the best ladies’ socks anywhere, the ones sold by the German drugstore chain Rossmann. (Their knee socks are the best, especially the knee-highs for under-trouser wear and wear with boots. Sleek, smooth, hard-wearing, and they stay the feck up. Trust me — find a Rossmann, get in there, buy socks.)
Anyway. I came across the box this morning and found that I’d saved the tags from the socks, probably with the intention of finding the company who’d made the socks and buying some more that didn’t have chimps on them. Interesting, though, that some minutes of Googling gives no indication of where they come from (except the tag says “Made In China”, as I’d sort of half suspected). And at MailChimp…
Yes, well. Not unexpected. So now I find myself in the position of having to write to MailChimp and find out what I can about where these were sourced and who else their source might be supplying.
The joke, though, is figuring out under which category to mail them…
I don’t think the Technical Support folks are going to thank me if I get onto them about socks.
Never mind. I’ll report back on this later.
…And yes, folks, the new dashboard is very nice. Now about these socks…