Appliance Repair Wisdom for the Ages

Friday, July 09, 2004

To All My Dear Grasshoppers and Esteemed Fellow Appliantologists:

Since announcing yesterday that I intended to delete the Appliantology Group repair forum, I have been flooded by hundreds of emails and phone calls from forum participants urging me to reconsider. After much soul-searching and careful deliberation, I have decided that deleting the Appliantology Group forum would be too rash an action. So, the existing content in the forum shall remain there, undeleted, as an eternal electronic monument to the selfless efforts of the many fine Appliantologists who have freely shared so much of their hard-earned wisdom with those Grasshoppers seeking answers to their appliance problems.

However, the Appliantology Group forum, as an interactive method of help, ended at midnight and new topics or replies can no longer be posted.

For several months now, I have been increasingly dissatisfied with the forum capabilities provided by MSN Groups. The most recent complaints galvanized me into finally ending this forum. Let me list some of its more onerous shortcomings:

• Posts cannot be edited by the original author or anyone else (yes, including me) for content, typos, whatever. Consequently, many posts, including my own, contain an embarrassing number of typos, sentence fragments, incorrect links, and other problems that either place a burden on the readers or, in cases of more grievous errors, require a followup post by the author to address the shortcomings in his original post.
• There is not a clear and concise way for forum readers to keep track of posts they have or have not read. Consequently, many posts get shoved down the list by newer posts and go unanswered--a frustrating situation for both the Grasshopper seeking information and Appliantologists seeking to provide that information.
• The forum has no means of searching for threads of interest. The best I could do was try to keep up a Forum Index of momentous threads. But this was a tedious task and soon became unmanageable. And since this is all done in my free time, when a task becomes tedious, I'll always find something better to do, such as laying on the couch, drinking Bud and watching Gilligan.
• The forum often has an annoying tendancy to just hang, displaying only the top banner ad and nothing else for several minutes. This again becomes tedious and, once more, I'm back on the couch, drinking Bud and watching Gilligan.
• In general, the forum lacks many features and functions that are commonly expected in a forum environment: post icons, personal icons, signatures, etc.

I know, the bells do indeed toll for yet another free appliance repair resource that bites the dust yet I ... wait, what's that over there? Could it be? Why, yes! Great Emperor! Ladies and Gentlemen, Grasshoppers and Gurus, Boyz and Beans, er, nevermind that last, let me introduce you to my long-time friend, Moostafa Hakkahallah!

Moostafa runs the finest appliance repair forum this side of Mecca. I approached Moostafa several weeks ago and asked him if he would consider taking over the forum portion of the Appliantology Group. After much negotiations and graft, Moostafa has graciously agreed. Now, lest you go away shaking your head and thinking he's just another towelhead with a smelly left hand, hoooooold on there, Bubbalouie, and let me introduce you to our dear, dear friend, Moostafa.

Moostafa comes to us from Jalalabad, Afghanistan, where he leads a quiet life in his desert tent with his four wives and 17 children, tending his camels and yaks. When he's not pleasing one of his wives or running his world-famous appliance repair forum, Moostafa keeps himself busy with various hobbies such as picking through rubble, searching for water, growing his beard, wrapping towels around his head, avoiding eating with his left hand, and praying to Allah that the Ameedicans, er, I mean, Americans will hurry up and build that damn pipeline through his country so he can finally get a job and feed his four wives and 17 children something other than camel leather and semen of yak.

I know, you're probably wondering how Moostafa can possibly run an appliance repair forum if he lives in a tent in the middle of some God-forsaken desert without even rudimentary sanitary facilities, let alone electricity or internet access. Ahh, this is what makes our dear friend, Moostafa, very special indeed.

Moostafa powers his iMac off a camel dung and lime juice battery that he designed himself and connects to the internet via an old Soviet military satellite uplink system that he acquired while he was a Mujahadeen in his youth. It's exactly that kind of Afghani know-how that makes Moostafa such a valuable appliance guru. So, come, kick off your sandals and gather 'round the carpet with the Ayatollah and learn how to wage Holy War on your infidel appliances.

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