05.14.06
The Death of PWASOH
The People With A Sense Of Humor (PWASOH) mailing list was started in 1991 when I sent a joke to a set of co-workers and got cheers from some and jeers from others who did not want their message boxes (this was before email) filled up with crap. I let people know that they could be added to the ‘People with a sense of humor’ list if they wanted to get more jokes and that anyone could be added or dropped at any time. Over time the list grew to friends, their friends, their friends’ relatives, people who they happened to chat with at a coffee shop.
Sometime around 1997 a picture I posted of an airport hangar filled with fire-retardant foam got passed around aviation web sites and my web server (running out of a closet in my home) was brought down to it’s knees as traffic increased 200 fold overnight. The following hundreds of requests to be added to the list forced a move from personal email management to a Yahoo Group where people could sign up and drop off as they wished.
I knew the list had ‘made it’ when, during a vacation in Hawaii, a perfect stranger stopped me on a street corner to ask if I was ‘that joke guy’. Honest engine, it really happened. The encounter left me a bit dumfounded but was neither the first nor the last. Then in 2001 disaster struck. Read the rest of this entry »