My php elephant (elephpant)
Ever since I’ve learned about the existence of the elephpant, I’ve wanted one. A goal not exactly romantic or worthy of being idealistic, but a lot more complicated than it looks.
Not even google can give very relevant results. The french company Nexen which is producing them don’t have any retail shops, in fact there isn’t any official retail market for them.
Although the Web is full of photos of the php elephant from all sorts of events, or even erotic ones, not the same thing can be said about places to buy if from.
The Nexus site states that there is a minimum of 50 small php elephants or 1 large, but here is where the story ends. At some point I decided to try to buy 50 elephant but… I was unable to do that either.
Eventually, after about 2 years of searching I’ve got by chance on eBay. I’ve thought that maybe a second hand one exists. It seems that there is somebody in US that is distributing! When I’m writing this blog it seems that not even that announcement exists, but with a little luck in few weeks will resurface. The search has to be on “php elephant” not “elephpant” which is the official name.
After about a couple of weeks since placing the order, it arrived! Now I’m the happy owner of an elephpant! The price is not exactly small, 15 pounds + delivery, but for this long awaited mascot I think it worth it.
It’s really quite small, but very nicely done, and very cute. He was my mascot from the ZCE 5.3 certification.
The mystery about the rarity of these elephants had an answer on elephpant.com: “No retail at the moment. We prefer relying on local PUG or online shop to actually do retail.”. It looks like at the moment the only way to get one is to find someone that bought 50 php elephants and now is selling some of them, or to buy 50 yourself!
The fate of the 2011 elephpants production it was decided at the end of last year, with a pre-order form on http://www.elephpant.com/. And most likely pre-orders will be soon available again.
When the pre-order form appeared on elephpant.com I even got a email telling me to pre-order if I’m still interested. So if you are interested you should subscribe to the newsletter.
With this generation a new pink php elephant is on his way! Probably they are here for the PHP Woman side of the community. There aren’t any images with this new elephant, because this is the first generation.