October 29, 2012, New York City
The Weather Channel had warned us a hurricane was coming, but we weren’t too worried about it. Irene had passed through the year before with barely a downed tree, and anyway it was too late to change our plans.
Two nights before Halloween, the staff of Squishable.com, Inc. was getting ready for a party. A virtual Halloween party. Twice before, our fans had surprised us by throwing secret parties on our Facebook page, flooding our timeline with hand-drawn pictures and photos of themselves and their stuffed animals decked out in party regalia, baking cookies, playing games, and generally having a good time. This time we were hosting the party ourselves. The invites had been posted days earlier on numerous social-media platforms, and hundreds of Squishable fans around the globe had already RSVP’d to say that they would (virtually) be there.
New York had preemptively declared a state of emergency, shutting down the subways, so our team was working from various locations around the city. On Facebook, a superfan like Dani would post, “We’re watching the weather channel, worrying about all our friends on the coast. Please stay safe!!! On a different subject—will the Halloween party be postponed?” For days, we’d been looking at each other and whispering, “What should we say?” Even with only hours to go, every so often one of us would chime in on our internal chat client with some version of “So . . . maybe this isn’t the night for this?” and we’d all Google the weather yet again.*
We didn’t want to disappoint anyone, and anyway preparations had already taken up three prime workdays when we should have been designing new products or approving fur samples. None of us had the traditional business background that might have warned about the dangers of the sunk-cost fallacy. The storm’s name hardly sounded threatening. Sandy? Really?
Squishable is a technology company with a toy habit, so the internal joke goes. We create stuffed animals. Big ones, little ones, quirky stuffed animals. As a rule the entire team has always been made up of refugees from other industries—software design, law, finance, government, media—and early on it allowed us to bypass a lot of pitfalls. Most toy companies sold largely wholesale; we sold more than half our stock directly off our website. Most toy companies released six to twelve new items per line a year; we released hundreds. Most toy companies targeted kids; we had plenty of kid fans, but our most active audience was teens and young adults. Most toy companies used a design team to come up with new ideas; we used our fans—their concepts, their design input, and, eventually, their drawings. We may have been the first company to ever release a plush Shrimp, Cthulhu, Grim Reaper, and Slice of Toast.
Earlier that year, we’d decided to try a Kickstarter campaign for a Squishable Shiba Inu, a design we hadn’t originally planned to make. It had come in second in a contest to determine the next dog breed to be prototyped, ranking just behind the Corgi (which had gone on to become a bestseller.) The Kickstarter launched with the concept art: a red dog with circular eye patches. The answer had been a resounding yes, yes, yes: the fans loved our red Shiba design concept and would gladly wait for the product to be manufactured, shipped, and released.
In early October, the Kickstarter was long over. The prototype pictures had just been posted when we received an unexpected fan comment: now that she saw the actual photo, she thought it should be colored gold, with different eye patches. Suddenly, angry comments filled our Kickstarter, Facebook, and inbox. We had ruined the design. We were evil. We had betrayed them. They were reporting us to Kickstarter. They would never buy another Squishable again.
We felt terrible. How had it all gone so wrong? I bit my fingernails bloody every night agonizing over what to do. We wanted to stay on the fans’ good side, but we hadn’t budgeted for a second variation. There were tears. Had we torpedoed the whole company by trying something innovative? Ahhh . . .
By late October, the office was tense. It was the right time for a feel-good event, a way to remind everyone that we were bigger than the color of a Shiba Inu. We wouldn’t get a chance like this for another year. In fact, once the holiday rush started in another couple of weeks, it would be all we could do to update social media at all. And besides, we really liked our fans.
At the time, there were only three of us on the creative team to run the party: designers Melissa and Kendra, and myself. Scott, our office manager, was prepping the content and materials. Everyone in the company planned to make at least one virtual appearance—even Charles, our general counsel, would join in.
Because everyone else lived in Brooklyn or Queens, the photography props had been dragged from our Union Square office over to the thirteenth-floor one-bedroom Aaron and I shared by the East River in Manhattan, just barely outside the mandatory evacuation zone. We knew there might be a power outage, so we had brought over half a dozen fully charged laptops. Between a Verizon Fios line, two different cell phone hot spots, and, if all else failed, a battered old Sprint cell modem from 2010, which we’d forgotten to cancel, there were plenty of paths to the Internet in case of emergency.
The fans had been posting their defiance for hours:
“Dear Sandy: do NOT knock out mine or anyone else’s power! We have a very squishy holiday party to attend! If you do, you will have to answer to MY wrath!! WRATH!! HELL HATH NO FURY LIKE A SQUISHER SCORNED!!!” wrote Mel.
“I am prepared for Frankenstorm. If we need to evacuate, I am demanding everyone take one full size squishable and one mini. The micros we be hanging on my mom’s bag. COME AT MEH BRO!” wrote Samantha.
“Be safe during Frankenstorm everyone! . . . Hopefully your house/apartment won’t flood and your Squishables won’t get wet!” posted Oceanus, the mini Squishable Narwhal, presumably by way of its owner.
With two hours to go, superfan Sara posted, “Is everyone ready for the Halloween Party?!?!?!?!? I can’t wait!! I have costumes ready for some of my squishy friends and I have to make some refreshments when I get home from work today. We carved pumpkins last night so I have to roast the seeds, make pumpkin muffins, popcorn and hot cocoa! I also have some candy and caramel apples too! So excited for a fun and delicious night!!”
Canceling was not an option. We were Squishable! We could weather a stinking superhurricane!
As the wind began to blow like it really meant it, Aaron and I ventured outdoors one more time, passing boarded-up windows and piles of sandbags by the subway entrances. We tried, and failed, to pick up extra batteries for the flashlights, and succeeded in buying the very last available bag of dog food for Oyster, our Yorkie-poodle puppy. Then we went home, filled the bathtub and sinks with water, opened some beers, and waited for seven p.m.
“I’m out—stay safe and dry guys!” wrote Beth, head of the customer-service team, from her home out in Michigan.
As 7:00 hit the Eastern seaboard, pictures started flowing into the Facebook page from early arrivals. “ok! here we go!” typed Melissa into our internal chat client. We posted our welcome to Facebook, and hundreds of fans wrote back variations of:
“WHOOOOO PARTY PARTY!!!”
“Party Time HERE!!!!!!!!!!!! Hoo WAH!!!!!!!”
“Beware! It is a guest arriving in the middle of gale force winds.”
“YAYYY! PARTY! :D ME AND MY 13 SQUISHIES ARE HERE!”
“TRICK OR SQUISH!!!!”
. . . and flooded the page with pictures of stuffed animals decked out like ghosts and pirates.
It started to rain at seven-thirty p.m. as we posted the rules for the limerick contest. At 7:45 it really started to rain as we posted the first photo of Squishables partying. From Sunset Park in south Brooklyn, Melissa posted a video of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” To the east, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Kendra posted black-and-white line art for fans to color. Melissa posted a call for drawing ideas. I put up photos of a Squishable Narwhal in a bowl of candy corn and a Squishable Horse bobbing for apples. We used personal Facebook accounts so the fans would know it was really us, and our posts mixed with hundreds of pictures from across the country: Squishable Gryphons dressed as Harry Potter characters, axolotls dressed like Sailor Moon, a bride-and-groom cow and bull, and a raccoon TV announcer.
“Can somebody draw me a narwhal?”
“I am making Zoe & Cthulhu cookies!!!!”
“Do any of you people know how difficult it is to come up costumes for 96 squishables?!”
“There was once a Squish from Nantucket . . .”
“This FB party is totally cheering me up :)”
The windows on the thirteenth floor were rattling in their frames. Down below, a family coming home from a hurricane party was tackled to the ground by a bunch of quick-thinking college kids just before mom, dad, and baby stepped into a wind tunnel between two buildings. They were all right, but their dog had to be reeled in from the flow by his leash.
We stuck to the timeline, tensely submitting each post on schedule. Costume contest at 8:00. Coloring-book page at 8:15. Photo of pumpkin decorating at 8:20. Melissa became overwhelmed by fan drawing requests and Kendra took over. Cell coverage turned spotty, and none of the drawings were posting from phones as planned.
“hahaha omg none of them are coming through. Omg. and there are more requests haha. halp,” wrote Melissa.†
“We laugh because otherwise we’d cry,” wrote Kendra. “I am gonna have grey hair by the end of tonight.”
During a lull, we opened one of the backup computers and brought up Twitter and CNN. Battery Park City to the south was underwater. Avenue C a couple blocks to the east was underwater. Hoboken was underwater. The subways were underwater. Through the windows, we could see the East River, a whole lot closer than it was before. We found out later that even as we typed, the massive NYU Langone Medical Center ten blocks north had lost its backup generators, its staff scrambling to evacuate patients and babies down its darkened stairwells.
“how are you guys fairing the hurricaine!?!? hope you’re okay!” posted fan Rachel.
We forwarded updates of pending power outages to each other. “#ConEd has begun the process of shutting off electrical service to a part of Brooklyn, to protect both company and customer equipment,” we warned our Brooklynites. In return, they posted photos from Twitter showing cars floating by, blocks from our apartment.
“Zoe, no offense, this FB party is a beautiful and terrible thing, and our reach is going to explode, but let’s never ever ever do this again,” Melissa wrote.
“I’m okay for now, just getting a little freaked!” wrote Kendra as the lights blinked on and off like mad.
“You don’t have to stay on if you don’t want—this is NOT your top priority.”
“It’s cool!” insisted Kendra. She later admitted she had been typing while huddled on the floor of her hallway, the only place in her apartment without windows, listening to the wind as it tore chunks of metal from her roof.
We posted and posted and posted, and the windows shook and the wind hoooowled, and the streets below turned into rivers. When we looked outside, the buildings around us had become dark, hulking islands rising up from the wet, with rain streaming down their sides. Could that possibly be water, pouring through below the FDR Drive? Oyster did not get his evening walk that night. I couldn’t have pried him out from under the bed anyway.
At around eight-thirty p.m., just after we posted a picture of a jellyfish trick-or-treating, there was a huge flash of light and a boom from the southeast, and seconds later the lights flickered out for the final time. We would later learn that the big Con Ed transformer over on 14th Street had exploded and plunged the southern half of Manhattan into blackness. Outside the rain poured on and on and on.
We broke out the backup laptops and tried the Internet. It was down. We tried the cell phones. They were down. We tried the old Sprint cell modem. It was working—there was just enough bandwidth to send a final SOS across the river to Brooklyn, where we could still see the lights glowing faintly through the storm. Tell Facebook we’re offline but not to worry, tell them to keep partying without us. Then those bars too went to zero.
So we sat in the dark and drank beers from the slowly warming fridge and laughed at how weird our lives had become.
The next morning we carried Oyster down thirteen flights of pitch-black stairs to survey the wreckage outside our door. The cars on 20th Street had floated inland and washed up everywhere, scattered across the sidewalk like LEGOs. Each was choked with debris up to the steering wheel. A huge railroad tie had been ripped out of the seawall and hurled on top of a Ford Mustang. The streets were clogged with dirt and sand and broken glass, with streams of brackish river water still cutting channels through the mess as it poured off the island. The bottom floor of the building next door had been torn apart, its crumpled door wedged half open in a deep pool of water like the remains of some kind of swampy apocalypse.
What seemed like the entire population of the East Village was standing on the beleaguered banks of the river, bundled in sweatshirts and blankets against the cold, their arms outstretched over their heads, cell phones held high in the wind to attract a signal off the distant towers in Brooklyn.
The first to contact us was Charles—he’d found working Wi-Fi somewhere underneath the Brooklyn Bridge where he was sharing space with a dozen bedraggled financiers. Slowly, one by one, the Squishable staff checked in by text and email and chat to say they were damp but safe.
Scott volunteered to cover “the socials” and tell the world we were still here. He checked back in a few minutes later to say that after we had disappeared, a couple of superfans had taken over the party to answer questions about the costume contest, post music, draw pictures, and keep it going until long after midnight. At one point, they had sponsored a countrywide game of “Two Truths and a Lie.”
“So happy to hear that everyone in NY is safe and squishy!” fan Cat had posted immediately. It was a perfect moment. Even spread across the city as we were, we all got a little choked up about it.
“That was a very high-octane social media thing we just did,” commented Melissa.
As we prepared for the hike uptown, with its promise of working outlets, warm hotel rooms, and steaming, life-giving bowls of noodle soup, my phone chimed one more time. I checked my email. It was a superfan. She wanted to let us know that she was really really really pissed about the color of the Shiba Inu.
Zoe Fraade-Blanar
* Please note that here and throughout the book we reproduce all social-media posts in their original, unedited form.
† Using the unedited text of social-media posts in this books saves us from correcting our own transcribed spelling and grammar mistakes too.