Those Mothersockers!

Hello! Today is the best day of the year for me. It is Kid’s birthday! Of course, everyone knows that today is also Mother’s Day. What a present! The year Kid was born, Mother’s Day fell the Sunday before I gave birth, and I remember going out to lunch with my friend Ben, and his mom. I wasn’t expecting anything, but was touched when TWO Mother’s Day mugs showed up at the table. I remember tearing up, which of course I thought was so wimpy of me, but soon realized that it was a permanent side effect of pregnancy. Anyways, even though this isn’t my first MD, I still have to remind myself that I now share this day with my mom. :-)

Now that I’ve shared some feel-good stuff, here comes my topic for today. I am planning to moan and b*t*h about something. I am sure many of you have heard about this knitting competition I entered last week, which is why this blog is running a couple days late. Here is how it works… We participants were entering a war in which we kill our target by knitting a pair of socks and snail mailing it to them. Of course, we also have our own killers. Once we’ve been killed, we are out of the running. The objective is to kill as many people as possible, and remain the last man standing. There are more details, but I won’t go into them since I know you aren’t reading this because you’re dying to know more about the contest. So, there were 1800 of us registered from all over the world, and everyone was supposed to get an email with the unique pattern (so no one could cheat by pre-knitting), and the specifics of our target (i.e. shoe size, address). These official emails were supposed to hit the circuit at 7am CST …and they didn’t. In fact, I can’t believe I was so excited that I barely got any sleep, and then I was up at 6:30am to get ready to start, as all my peers were (according to the open forum on the website). There were people who didn’t sleep at all since it would reach them at like 2am their time.

Well, at 10am we all finally noticed a posting on the website with the pattern. It was 3 hours late (growling), and by then I had an awesome headache, which became worse when I realized that it was half-as*ed. Sorry for the bad language, but this is nothing compared to what I was thinking at the time. The only consolation was that we could knit to a certain point before we needed our target’s shoe size, so knitting needles began flying at speeds that defied logic (haha). It was actually a lot of fun, and I managed to relax and knit with my eyes closed (to ease the headache). I was so darned excited, and this was the first time I was knitting a sock (you can’t count the one I knit the day before to kind of familiarize myself with the method of sock-knitting, since it didn’t look like anything that would fit a human foot). I knit for most of the day on and off, and hoped to mail out the socks the next day. Well, the further I got, the more confused I got, and thanks to the open forum, I realized that my confusion was stemmed in the fact that there were numerous errors in the pattern. I could feel the dark clouds rolling in on my sunny horizon now…

Before we could participate in the competition, we had to become a member. And in order to become a member we had to pay money. Albeit, not a lot of money, but still… money is money. And I expected some punctuality and proof-reading, but that was not to be, and little did I know that this was only the tip of the iceberg. The coordinator had managed somehow to get in over her head. This is the third annual war, and it seems she’s never had over 500 people in the competition, so it’s always gone well in the past. On top she had a death in her family some time in the past 2 weeks. I wanted to throttle the people on the forum that were verbally bashing anyone commenting on how ill-organized this whole thing was. It went along the lines of, “she is volunteering to do this, not being paid”; “she is mourning a family member”; “she is doing this alone, no one else is running the show with her”; etc. First of all, she may be doing this for free, but we AREN’T. I don’t care how little money it is, we paid. Secondly, I am very sympathetic to a death in the family, I’ve had my share. I am positive that no one would have faulted her if she’d postponed the start date for the competition. People would have been more than obliging if she’d posted on the website that she’d rather wait, and do this right, than stick to the original date, and do this in such a crappy fashion. Third, I’m pretty sure that most knitters are very enthusiastic and if she’d asked for some FREE help, she would have gotten it. No one placed a gun to her head and insisted that she do this NOW and do it ALONE. At this point, I am still keeping my cool, even though it doesn’t seem like it. I was a bit miffed, but probably not as much as some of the other participants. Now here is the straw that broke my back (me being the camel in this scenario :-)). I kept checking my email every few hours to see if I’d gotten my email, and wondering if I’d have to knit two half socks before getting this information. I was reading something on the forum when I realized there were a couple of threads going on and on about how…. apparently some people had gotten their emails… 2 hours before the official posting of the pattern on the website!!! In case you don’t know, you should react with a sharp intake of breath at this moment. I know that to non-knitters, this may not seem like a big deal, but it is!! These people not only started knitting that darned sock, but they had all their info in front of them and could now feasibly send their socks out the very next morning while the rest of us poor dogs would work our fingers to the bone and still not have a prayer of mailing out until Monday! Hold on, hold on, we haven’t gotten to the breaking back part… then the coordinator, who still hadn’t sent out these emails to the majority of contestants by the 24 hour mark, posted killers and targets and all their info on the website. Of course my target’s shoe size was listed in the UK size, and EU size, but the US size had been cut off the page… *sigh* I’d just look it up according to what I had, but then... We had been told that in this first round, our targets would come from the same vicinity as we are. My target was in Tasmania, Australia… ok, ok…. That’s fine I figured. This must mean that my killer is also from some other country so that the time it takes for the socks to reach in both instances must be somewhat equal, right? Right?? NO. My killer is right here in the US. Do I even have a chance at this point? Of course not. Not unless my killer goes into a coma for about a month, or manages to slam 5 of her/his 10 fingers in a door. Not that I’m wishing any such thing, just giving you examples, *evil grin*.

I was so terribly disappointed, and if that was maybe one of two things that had gone wrong, I might have just sucked it up and continued… but when I added the lack of punctuality, pattern errors, unfair advantage for some participants over others, absence of organization, and now a definite death sentence by location, I got fed up. It was definitely the end of it for me. I wrote my killer an apology for any inconvenience and re-directed her to my target. And then, to my credit, I wrote the coordinator asking her to remove me from the list WITHOUT ripping her to pieces in the email. This whole event got quite a bit of media attention and even a sponsor— so you’d think… but guess not. Anyways, as a final note, I still wanted to go back and slap some people around on the forum that were still busy telling others that they should be thankful for the roof over their head and the food on their table instead of getting mad at the coordinator for the mess she made… really? Can we keep things in perspective and stick to the context of the situation? And they call me a drama queen…. *huff*

Happy Mother's Day!