Get the ink blots.

This kind of has to do with knitting, in that it was a knitting issue that started it and knitting blogs that are making me boggle.

Specifically, it's about the Blue Moon Fiber Arts mess they had with their bank (if you heaven't heard yet, click and read, it's been all over the 'net and I'm not doing another recitation). And for a bit of background, I was a bookkeeper for many, many years before I busted up my hand and couldn't hold a pencil for forty hours a week any longer. So I know a good bit about small-business banking and related crap. Plus I'm related to an accountant if I need advice.

Long story short, their bank totally fucked up. I suspect their behavior was legal, strictly speaking, but it was horribly bad business practice. The Blue Moon ladies dealt with it calmly and professionally and to my knowledge are up and running again with a new bank less than a week later. What's interesting, though, is how other knitters are responding to the situation.

First, of course, were the calls for retribution. I was thinking 'give us their e-mail address and let us crash their mainframe' - computer geek that I am, but most of it was a desire to know the bank's name so that complaint letters could be issued. That's a fairly average response, I would say. Someone suggested that everyone should knit a sock and mail it to the bank, which was rather inspired; peaceful and to the point. Ultimately cooler heads prevailed, pointing out that nothing would help the deeds already done, and it was all moot anyway, what with Blue Moon keeping their council. (I don't blame them for not wanting to be responsible for a flood of hate mail, deserved or not. That's just more bad business practice, and right now they're golden, best to keep it that way.)

Then there were the other comments. Somehow the commenter's views got tied to the issue. (Isn't that always the way?) A lot was said about how women in business get treated like shit and this was just another example of it. It got expanded, at least in one case I will not link to, into a huge riff on how this is further trampling on the rights of women, and yadda yadda yadda. How did this get to be women's rights? It's not about women. It's about dumbasses at a bank who can't be bothered to investigate before they make (stupid) policy. I'm sure psychologists would have some term for this, but I call it "Oh, geez, get a grip." (Having done small business accounting stuff in three states, I'm here to tell you, ALL small businesses get treated like shit. Gender doesn't enter in, except in the eye of the beholder.)

THEN, in one case that I know of, there was the "Let's get a laugh out of this" response. January One decided that the best way to help Blue Moon was to get more people addicted to their sock yarn. (Sort of like drug pushers creating addicts, but different.) So she put out a call for "Socks that Rock virgins" on her blog, promising to do a drawing and give away ten hanks of the stuff from her own stash, thereby - according to her - creating ten more customers for Blue Moon. Soon the comments filled up with almost EIGHT HUNDRED often hilarious stories of why people were sock knitting virgins and why they needed that yarn. Blue Moon got wind, read the comments, and had such a laugh that they donated more yarn to give away, and, long story short, THIRTY hanks of Socks That Rock were given away on her blog. Even if she doesn't create thirty sock-knitting addicts, giving the Blue Moon ladies a good laugh was the best possible thing to have done in this situation.

It is fascinating, to me, how different people deal with the same issue.