Harlotted IRL

I discovered that my real-world Not-So Local Yarn Store (NSLYS) had been ‘crashed’ by the Yarn Harlot.

There is a phenomenon online, where someone with a relatively low bandwidth (pipe to the internet) is happily posting away and their blog/article/story gets noticed and posted about on a geek site called Slashdot. Bazillions of geeks come to see the story and, Fwa-DOINK, their pipe gets clogged, their site is inaccessible and they are deemed to have been “Slashdotted“.

I have recently noticed this happening with some frequency whenever the Yarn Harlot mentions another knitting site (or blog). She innocently says, for example, “Heathen Housewife wants your odds and ends of sock yarn” and, Fwa-DOINK, poor Shelly’s site buckles under the weight of a billion knitters descending upon it.

I have coined (I think) a new term for this:

Harlotted: adj., to have your site overloaded after a mention by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee in her blog.

Anyhoo, recently Stephanie posted pictures of her pre and post-felting Fiber Trends clogs.
Hundreds of readers commented, many to say they had made the clogs too, and how great they were. The rest promptly went off, as I did, and ‘Googled’ for the pattern.

If they were like me, they clicked on the top Google hit for stores stocking the pattern, Noble Knits.

I ordered and promptly rushed out to buy some yarn, anticipating having the pattern in my hands in a few days.

I waited.

And waited.

And, after a week I emailed.

And waited some more.

Then I discovered that Noble Knits is right here in my own backyard (well, not literally. I have a very small and hilly backyard…) so I strapped the children into the car and took a cruise to find it.

I found it and it looked lovely…and closed.

I went back a couple of days later, asked for the pattern and mentioned that I had ordered it online too a week and a half earlier, but was too impatient to wait.

“It’s the strangest thing,” said the proprietress, all perplexed. “Out of nowhere we got hundreds of orders for those things. Then we were out of stock and the publisher was out of stock and there was a trade show going on, so we just got our new shipment yesterday. But I don’t understand what happened…”

“Ha!” I laughed. “I know exactly what happened!”

I explained that she had been Harlotted, and advised her to watch the blog to see what Stephanie is talking about, and stock up accordingly. This is, after all, a woman who can inspire knitters to donate $150,000 to charity within a few short weeks.

Steph, you are a force to be reckoned with!