Registration Update

We sent an email out yesterday that had the letter below in it to everyone on our mailing list and to all who we have listed as registered.  You see thanks to the Great Sock Summit Server Crash of 2009 we all are having several recurring nightmares with revolving themes all involving large numbers of confused and unhappy knitters.

We are doing our dead level best to make sure we have reached out to everyone who might have a registration issue.
I know we said it in the letter below but I am going to emphasize it (probably over so) again.
Please check make absolute sure that you in fact did receive a confirmation email with confirmation numbers on it for everything you registered for.
If you have that information you are golden no need to contact us. Don’t get me wrong we love to hear from you but the inbox is a wee bit of a scary place these days. So many sock knitters so little time.

Steph and I are working on getting the shopping cart up and the Sock Museum KAL so look for those really soon.
Also, the market place is coming together so beautifully and honestly, exceeding even my wildest dreams which is no small feat.
Ok… off to help pack for Black Sheep and to the bank to get the cash for the cash box which yours truly spaced out yesterday. (I have SS09 brain, blue moon is being very patient with me.)

Dear Everyone,
As some of you may know from experience, the sheer numbers of avid sock knitters who attempted to sign up for the Summit sort of… well.  Fried our server.  Things got up and running again very quickly, but for about a half hour there, things were nothing short of dodgy.

We can’t apologize enough for this, and we’re sorry not just for all of you, but for our staff and friends who have helped us manually process all of the errors and corrections over the last few weeks. We totally owe them socks (and probably hard liquor, but we’re not giving them that until after the Summit.)

We believe at this time that we’ve handled everything in our inbox. If you haven’t heard from us, then please write again to .  (There were a few people we couldn’t reach due to incorrect emails or phone numbers, so please, please write again before thinking we’re not happy to help.)

In addition, we want to stress that you need confirmation numbers to check into the Sock Summit.  If you experienced a problem at registration and didn’t get those confirmation numbers, you need to write to us, so that we can confirm you’re registered, and send you the numbers.  If you did not see confirmation numbers, you may not be registered.  We’ve been doing our level best to see everyone through this happy, and we’ll do our best to help you too.

In addition, because we’ve been using the few returns and cancellations we received to help solve problems, there are very few classes to put up for grabs.  As we can see no reasonable way for thousands of knitters to compete for a few spots, and we are helpless in the face of the unbelievable mass of all of you, we’re not going to re-open registration. If any spots remain open at the time of the Summit, knitters will be able to sign up for them at the registration desk.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

ST-1, ST2
and the dedicated (but tired) team that backs them up.

Sock Summit meeting 4,723…

There are meetings and then there are meetings. There are the necessary more formal business type meetings like the convention center meetings and exhibitor meetings, lawyer meetings, web meetings, accounting meetings and hotel meetings with good people doing their jobs and helping us do ours.

Then there are the meetings with the team I usually work with in relationship to all things Blue Moon. They are all awesome people who are great at their jobs and really fun to work with. The fun thing is pretty essential for me on the creative end of things.  So of course when needing these jobs done for sock summit we would bring these people in to help. 

Our graphic team is Cassie Caldwell and Tim Bergman. They designed the sock summit logo and have put it in on everything we thought we could get it on without feeling like we look as obsessed by it as we are.

We really love the logo that they came up with for us and all of it’s little parts and pieces. They are also responsible for all of the website graphic and look. Tim and Cassie are very creative, know their stuff and so much fun to work with. We really love working with them.

Another really great team are our printers, Randy and his superb crew at Brown Printing. Actually Randy introduced me to Tim and Cassie. He thought we would be a good match and boy was he spot on. We all enjoy and respect each other and then the work follows pretty effortlessly from there.

Yesterday afternoon we had a meeting to work on the show brochure,name tags… .  Debbi and I (cockeyed the sockateer and your vendor goddess) met with Cassie (Tim is teaching at PSU) and Randy at Brown (where they have printing presses and it smells like ink and is oh so lovely if you like words and graphics). They are also green and responsible. You can check them out here; http://www.brownprn.com/

This was the first time that Debbi and Cassie had met and I was really looking forward to it.  You know in that way where you have two people you care about and you know they will really like each other. So I arrive and of course everyone is already there because now I am that “late” person.  I have decided to look at it as I am on time, they are just a wee bit early.

Anyway I walk in the door and this is what I see.

Debbi on the left, Cassie on the right, a pretty well matched team don’t you think. Made me feel a little great about my people skills. Honestly it cracked me up all day and truly, you could have knocked me over when I walked in that door yesterday and saw that vision.

It was a very productive meeting. We got a lot done, the show book is going to be great and Randy is helping with all sorts of things paper and ink-wise.
Two of my favorite people got to meet and well, you see.  You can’t really see it here but even the nail polish color was the same.

All in all, a good day.

Survivng the storm.

Today is my birthday. I was born 52 years ago in a hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. I was premature, my mother had toximia. My family did not think I was going to make it.
My uncles did not want my mother to name me because they did not want her to get attached and heartbroken. I rallied and rallied and finally it was clear I was going to make it. I was ugly, wrinkled and looked burned and was very small, but I made it. I fought and survived.

This has been my MO ever since. I am a survivor. I like my life and the way it has shaped me into who I am now. As lives go, it has not been an easy one. It has made me really strong, kind of brave, compassionate and believe it or not optimistic.

It has made me appreciate every single moment of life and is teaching me to see them all as opportunities, no matter what they look like. I am still working on this part. It is so much easier to see and accept the lessons in life when they come packaged all pretty and nice, isn’t it? All wrapped up with a bow, all tidy and easy. It’s the dirty, messy, scary ones that are a little harder to see as anything other than pain and suffering. It is hard to weed through the debris to see that, in fact, there is light and love and hope.

I don’t know about you, but I have found that even though I truly hate these parts of life and would vote for being done with them (really, if there was a place to vote and I missed out, I’m going to be so bummed), they have given me a wealth of knowledge, experience and, yes, even joy. Teaching me to look beyond what is presented to me to see what might lie inside or underneath or maybe is exactly what it is and only that.

I have spent a good chunk of this week doing all of this. And, honestly, I tell you I have needed every skill I’ve picked up along this 52-year journey of mine in order to gracefully walk through it.

But I find myself stumbling a bit. The most challenging part of this for me has been the hate and cruelty directed at Stephanie and I. Personal attacks on our character and threats to our businesses. It is painful, shocking and, honestly, a little scary.

Oh, and I almost forgot . . . undeserved. We do not deserve this kind of reaction, projection and irresponsibility. Actually, no one does. I understand the disappointment and frustration. We both do. We have a lot of the same feelings in relation to this as you do.

Honestly, how could we not? SS09 has taken so much time and energy to plan and implement. Add in the extra time to be taken seriously and, well, does anyone really think we have worked this hard to make something that many could participate in no matter what they chose to do while keeping the costs down as far as we could get them, only to have registration look like this? This was definitely not the plan.

We have run reports and based on what we have found and what we have gotten from IT experts there was no way we could have predicted this and we would be hard pressed to afford a server situation to take care of it. You should see our IT friends faces pale when we tell this story.

Our IT team is running reports and problem solving with us so we can work through this in an efficient and timely manner.

We are rallying.

We are painstakingly going through the emails to solve everyone’s problem and we will do our absolute best to do this.

There were 12,000 signed up on our mailing list. This is the number we went by. Rule of thumb is you count that 10% of that number is your true customer base. Knowing our actual customer base, we took that 10% and multiplied it by four. In the non-knitter world, that would have been more than enough (and actually a bit of a financial risk on on our part and a huge leap of faith). How could we have known that not only would we be hit with more than the 12,000 but over double that? ( that would be at least 30,000) We could not.

Along with the hate has also been a whole lot of patience, understanding, compassion and love directed to us and also knitter to knitter. We have a fair number of emails from knitters offering to give up classes so someone else can have one. We have lovely stories about how people tried and tried and got in or maybe they did not and how they are choosing to deal with it to make the most positive experience for themselves.

There are those that will think I am making excuses or belittling their experience. I am not. I’m just trying to give us all a little perspective. It is easier to problem solve when the problem is clear and not clouded with other issues.

We will keep you all in the loop so keep checking in.

Announcement:

We aren’t going to be putting up the page where you can search for your registration, because it isn’t a “for sure” way of telling what’s going on. When we were testing it, we had a lot of trouble and realized that, if we put it up, what’s going to happen is that people are going to search, not find themselves, figure they aren’t there, and freak out. Meanwhile, they are (in fact) there, they just have a typo or glitch. We’ve decided to make sure that everything is accurate by doing it all MANUALLY, ourselves. That means that, if you have a problem, you should write to us on the “Contact Us” page with as many details as you can and we’ll sort it out. If you already wrote us, we’re on it. The first refunds went out today, and we have all our staff working only on this. Also, we have hired more staff and the IT company is lending us people. It should go quickly, but please be patient. We’ll sort everybody out as best we can, as quickly as we can. The good news about duplicates is that there may be some open slots coming up on the website. Haunt the place, you might get lucky yet!

Answers to most-asked questions and comments:

-No. We can’t make it bigger. It’s already the biggest ever. It’s really big, and there isn’t more room at the Conference Centre, and we actually don’t have a responsibility to make sure everyone can fit. A knitting conference for tens of thousands of knitters isn’t a reasonable thing to ask of us.

-No. We can’t get the bigger ballroom at the Art Museum. It’s is booked and has been since we tried to book it before.

- No. We can’t put more students in all the classes. Class size is dictated by the teachers. That’s industry standard and if the classes were any bigger you would just be sad that the classes were so big you couldn’t learn in them.

- No. We can’t get Barbara Walker to do some extra lectures. She’s almost 80 and a retired and extraordinarily well respected matriarch of our community. We won’t be exhausting her.

No. we don’t agree that we are horrible people because you didn’t get what you wanted. We are very, very sorry you are disappointed. We are even sorrier about the server crash, because it made what we now understand was inevitable - a lot of disappointed knitters, a lot who think that if the server hadn’t crashed it would have worked out for them. The server slowed down for all of you. It crashed for all of you. Nobody got an advantage and we’re heartbroken that you’re sad. Write to us. We’re helping everyone as best as we can. Really. While we don’t think we’re horrible, we know that this feels horrible, and we want to make as many people happy as we can.

ooops P.S. PLEASE, the blue moon staff and sock summit team ask that all the love messages be sent here in comments and to Stephs blog. Thanks ever so much.