How we got our name...

Everybody asks where I got the name "Fireproof Socks". It's kinda a funny story. Once upon a time, I lived in China, and I made friends with one crazy expatriate from Germany who had that special quality... maybe you know someone like this. Someone to whom everything happens. She was the type of person whose plane would catch fire but like a cat, she always lands on her feet.

So everyone who's lived in China knows about the "bad China days"... those days when you would go completely insane with the crazy stuff that goes on in that country. Stuff like when the "repairman" comes over to fix your radiator, and instead of fixing the whole thing in one go, he takes off one part, then goes to your neighbor's apartment, takes the same piece off of their radiator, and moves down the whole hallway until the heating system of the entire floor is in complete disarray, only to return to your apartment the next day to remove the next piece. It takes a thick skin.

And so was on just such a fine day when my friend left work in a tizzy, nearly losing her mind with the idiotic tactics there. All she wanted was to put her feet up and relax with a stiff drink.

But instead of walking into her empty home, her landlord was there, showing her apartment to a young couple. "Oh, you have to move out" said the landlord. "Tonight." Only in China. Apparently, the landlord was not allowed to rent to foreigners, and instead of obeying that restriction, the landlord rented out the apartment to my unsuspecting friend for several months until she could find a legitimate tenant. Of course, not a word was said to my friend about this until she walked in on the devious plot. Only in China.

Amazingly, my friend managed to hurl her belongings into bags and boxes, and miraculously, through a friend of a friend of a friend she found a new apartment and got her belongings moved in a single evening. What she thought was a bad day had exploded into a species of insanity that's only possible in a place like China.

Finally, after all of this, she collapsed into a pile of boxes and closed her eyes. And it was at that moment that there was a knock on her door: someone was going door-to-door selling socks. It was bad timing, so she practically shut the door on this guy's face, but in his desperation to make a sale, he started hurling any possible sales pitch at her, and his final flailing claim about his socks was.... (you guessed it) "THEY'RE FIREPROOF."

Well, it was weird enough to phase my friend, so she actually bought the socks, and to the salesman's credit, the socks actually were fireproof -- my friend tried to incinerate them with her lighter.

Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, I happened to be filling out a form for registering a business name, and her email detailing this crazy story arrived at the precise time I was stuck trying to come up with a name. I thought it was just form fodder, but here I am years later having built a business on that name, and Google still can't figure out what ads to show on this site.