Putting together the Bobbledy Books website was a long and tiring affair (Matthew pointed out yesterday that the last time he took the kids to visit his dad in Kansas City was when I first started working on the site – TEN MONTHS AGO). When in the throes of working on web content, I lose all track of time. My eyes are constantly frozen in “surprise” mode (eyebrows raised, eyes popping out) and as a result, my contacts get kind of glued to my eyeballs. I cannot be interrupted for even 5 minutes because I will forget where I was and what I was doing, and will have to spend 45 minutes trying to figure out where I was before I got interrupted.

All of this is to say that anything, anything that might make my experience even just the tiniest bit more pleasant is welcome.

Enter MailChimp. MailChimp is the program we use to collect our email list and to send out our email newsletters (for FREE!). While trying to set up Bobbledy Books, I had a bunch of questions about how to integrate MailChimp. Because my brain works in such a way that I cannot lose my train of thought for even one second, I made use of their online chat support (also, FREE!). And let me tell you – the customer service was THROUGH THE ROOF. Aside from the fact that the person who helped me actually knew what he was talking about and understood what I was talking about, we had some hilarious back-and-forth that totally endeared the whole company to me. It was such a pleasure to engage with a tech person on a goofy, human level. When our chat ended, he wished us luck on our new endeavor, and asked if I would like a MailChimp hat or t-shirt, since he liked our site and was allowed to send free stuff to people he thought would like it. He told me the hat was a wool hat, which made me perk up my ears. Many of you know that in tough times, I don my genius hat to really get down to work. Though I love my genius hat, I’ve been feeling lately that I could use more of a genius-not-neccessary-but-middling-intelligence-required hat, for the less-dire-but-more-everyday circumstances that foil me.

And then he sent me a picture of the hat in question:

OMG THAT MIGHT JUST BE THE COOLEST FRICKIN’ HAT EVER!!!!!!!

In the interest of due diligence, I asked what the t-shirt looked like, but unless it was made out of spun gold, there was no way it was going to beat out the hat. Turns out, it’s not made out of spun gold. So I chose the hat. He suggested I take a picture of Iggy wearing the hat when it arrived.

This is easier said than done. A week later the hat arrived, and Iggy, long-suffering though she is, had no patience for being dressed up.

No patience at all.

We discovered that the hat was best worn around the neck:

or, even BETTER, between the teeth:

Alden decided in all of the hullaballoo that the MailChimp hat really was for her:

But – recognizing that it’s just a genius-not-neccessary-but-middling-intelligence-required hat, felt she needed to shore up its powers a bit with a mustache accessory:

Lucky for me, the hat also arrived with a few other treats:

A coloring book, some awesome chimp stickers, and a postcard. A handwritten postcard!

These guys have taken customer service to a whole new level. Yeah, they bought my heart with a few trinkets, sure, but I will shill for them till the day I die. Because, you see, I was able to convince Alden that stickers and a coloring book were better than a monkey hat, and I was able to convince Iggy that a peanut butter filled beef bone was better than a monkey hat (I admit, it didn’t take much convincing) – and I now have a secret weapon to help me through those not infrequent less-trying-but-still-perplexing times: my new Genius-Not-Neccessary-But-Middling-Intelligence-Required Hat.

Thank you, MailChimp, for the dawning of a new era of Robbi fortitude.