The Twelve Steps of Appleholics Anonymous

The relative success of the Appleholics program seems to be due to the fact that a Mac user who no longer buys Apple products has an exceptional faculty for "reaching" and helping an uncontrolled Mac user.

In simplest form, the Appleholics Anonymous program operates when a recovered Mac user passes along the story of his or her own problem mousing, describes the serenity he or she has found in A.A., and invites the newcomer to join the informal user group.

The heart of the suggested program of personal recovery is contained in Twelve Steps describing the experience of the earliest members of the user group:

We admitted we were powerless over Apple - that our budgets had become unmanageable.
Came to believe that a PC cheaper and faster than a Mac could restore us to competitiveness.
Made a decision to turn our programs and our data over to the care of Windows as we understood it.
Made a searching and fearless backup of our hard drives.
Admitted to Usenet, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
Were entirely ready to have Java remove all these defects of code.
Humbly asked cloners to take our Macs as trade-ins.
Made a list of all PC users we had flamed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would crash their systems or corrupt their data.
Continued to review our posts and email, and when we were flaming promptly cancelled them.
Sought through ISDN and ASDL to improve our conscious contact with the Net as we understood it, praying only for URLs of the best shareware games and the bandwidth to download them.
Having had a rational enlightenment as the result of these steps, we tried to email this message to Mac users and to practice these principles on all our purchase orders.

Newbies are not asked to accept or follow these Twelve Steps in their entirety if they do not have the RAM or hard disk capacity to do so.

They will usually be asked to keep an open mind, to attend chat rooms in which recovered Mac users describe their personal experiences in achieving platform agnosticism, and to read Appleholics web pages describing and interpreting the Appleholics Anonymous program.

Appleholics Anonymous members will usually emphasize to newbies that only problem Mac users themselves, individually, can determine whether or not they are in fact appleholics.

At the same time, it will be pointed out that all available medical testimony indicates that appleholism is a progressive illness, that it cannot be cured in the ordinary sense of the term, but that it can be arrested through total abstinence from advocacy newsgroups in any form.

What happened to the Well Connected Mac?