Why AWOL?
As readers will hopefully have noticed, over the last few months we have been revamping the site, trying to make it more easily accessible and simpler to navigate. In the process, we have come to the realisation that nowhere on the site is any explanation of our name, or how it came to be, so this short post is to fill that hole.
As outlined here, the AWOL newspaper was launched in 2008, and the name and concept was the idea of Colin Devonshire, whose wife Boom was in charge of the monthly Observer magazine in Hua Hin; the Observer ceased printing in 2010, after about 20 years. AWOL is an acronym that originates from the military, and stands for Absent Without Official Leave; the name was always intended as a joke, playing on the idea that the expats who had made Hua Hin their home, and were the major target audience of the paper, had ‘escaped’ from their home countries in a manner similar to soldiers escaping their service. There were several other suggestions for the name, with ‘The Soi’ being my offering (soi is the Thai word for street), but an informal vote led to AWOL being chosen.
After AWOL separated from the Observer at the start of 2009, while it had only published 13 issues at that point, it had already found a place in the hearts of the expat community, so the name continued, and when the website was launched, unfortunately but predictably, AWOL.com was not available, nor the only other option at the time, AWOL.net, and we had to settle for AWOLonline.net. This was 2010 after all!
As a side note, the tag line, “For The Expat In All Of Us” was my idea, and was used, to some comedic effect, on the t-shirts that were handed out free to the girls working in the main bar area of Hua Hin when the paper launched; the intent of the phrase was that a lot of people like the idea of living or retiring to a beach resort in an exotic country, but when Thai bar girls, who are often seen as being on the lookout for a wealthy foreign husband, are wearing that slogan it has, let us say, a different connotation!
I should add a final note about the printed AWOL; while the idea of reviving it and publishing again has been asked for by former readers, and does have some appeal, unless business conditions and Thai legal requirements change drastically, it will never happen; even at it’s most successful, AWOL never truly justified in earnings from advertising the effort and cost of producing it. And times have changed – very few people read newspapers now, and these numbers will continue to diminish as the digital world further establishes it’s dominance. It is what it is, and if any business, product or anything else is not supported either financially or by being used, they will not be around for very long. A current example of this is physical money, which will disappear if people don’t use it. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing is for each individual to assess, but this is just the economic laws of supply and demand in essence. Or to put it more simply – Use It Or Lose It!