Medium Sent Me a Free T Shirt!
I Didn’t Even Know That Was a Thing
I recently published an essay about the fact that I’ve become an unofficial, unpaid Medium Sherpa, which is to say that I’ve helped a lot of friends and family members get started on this platform:
It wasn’t curated, of course. I didn’t expect it to be, because (1) most of my stuff isn’t and (2) it was about Medium.
To my knowledge, essays on Medium about Medium are never curated.
Who cares? I was just happy that people were reading and enjoying it. It currently has 220 reads, 63 Fans and a 62% Read Ratio. Not bad for an Uncurated piece published in an obscure publication.
Even better? It generated a slew of Medium-related questions in the “Responses” section, which were fun to answer.
It’s even earned me a whopping $5.93.
But it gets better! The day after I published it, Medium posted the following private note on the piece:
Thanks so much for doing what you’re doing — helping writers get up and running and making a wonderful creative community here. We’d love to send you a shirt!
At their request, I gave them my T-shirt size and mailing address. Two weeks later — I had a free Medium T Shirt!
It fits perfectly! It looks great!
And it answered a question I’d had — is Medium actually reading our posts? Apparently, they are. (At least, they seem to have read this one.)
I had no idea this was a thing. I’d never heard of Medium handing out free T shirts to writers for posts that they like.
So, naturally, I decided to write about it. Why? To let my fellow Medium writers know that this is a thing. (And I’m totally going to tag it This Happened to Me.) And to explore what kind of a thing it is.
Has this happened to anybody else? How often does it happen? Has it happened to you?
It could be that I’m the only writer in the history of Medium to receive a free T shirt. Or it could be that everybody has been getting them, but I’m just the only writer in the history of Medium to write about it.
So please — let me know. Have you ever received Free Medium Merch? What did they send you? A T shirt? A cap? An autographed photo of Ev Williams? Promotional jodhpurs featuring the Medium logo?
Whatever Medium sent (or didn’t send) you, I look forward to hearing all about it.
The only thing I know for certain at this point?
Medium is full of surprises.
Writing Coach Roz Warren, who writes for everyone from the Funny Times to the New York Times, can help you improve and publish your work. Drop her a line at [email protected]. (That’s Ros with an “s,” not a “z.”)
