Remove probe? It's hard to find a kitchen aid at KitchenAid.com

On Friday morning, something started beeping in the kitchen. Since there are several items in the kitchen with beep capability, it took me a while to isolate the beep. It turned out that our KitchenAid oven was telling us to either enter a temperature, or remove the temperature probe.

Unfortunately, we had not inserted a temperature probe into our oven.

Using my well-honed customer support skills, I proceeded to press every "stop" or "off" button on the oven control panel. This only caused it to beep more. Reluctantly, I realized that I would have to reboot the oven...but since the oven plug was inaccessible, I would have to reboot the house (via the fuse box).

But before I did this, I figured I'd look at the KitchenAid manual to see what help it offered for this situation. It offered none.

As I was waiting for the dishwasher to finish so that I could reboot the house, the problem cleared itself up.

That's when I decided that I'd conduct an Internet search to see if others had encountered the problem, and I found this thread at HowToMendIt.com. Early entries in the thread were not encouraging, beginning with the original question:

We don't have the oven probe. The oven thinks the probe is plugged in--the probe signal is on. The oven won't work because it thinks the probe is plugged in. When we try to start the oven, the display reads, "pull probe out".
We have turned the unit off (via the fuse box, so it's OFF), several times for extended periods, and the problem still doesn't go away. I've tried cleaning the plug where the probe is inserted, but nothing. A call to Kitchenaid's 800 number got us the great advice to call a certified repair man. We know that means big bucks. Anyone else had this problem? We're without an oven until solved. Thanks!

Here's one of the early entries in the thread:

Sorry, no advice from me. I too am looking for an answer as my Kitchen Aid stove suddenly displayed "Remove Probe" last night and I haven't been able to turn it on since, even after unplugging it for extended periods. I bought my first Kitchen Aid stove in 2000 and after 3 years the oven door froze shut after cleaning.
The repair man came, concluded the computer panel was shot and eventually I was offered the new model for $600. I had no choice. Now 5 years later I have the sinking feeling that my second $2000 oven will again need replacing. I'll keep you posted. Needless to say, stay away from Kitchen Aid stoves and if I had it do all over again, I'd completely avoid computerized units and opt for a higher end old school model.

However, as the thread progressed, solutions began to appear:

I have a possible answer!!! We had the repairman out...of course, our oven started working before he made it out. But he said the probe hole can get moisture in it and cause the oven to not work until it evaporates. Which sorta explains why several of us had it start working again. It looks like several people also had it happen Christmas, probably with lots of stuff in the oven for a long time, creating lots of moisture.

And there were various suggestions regarding ways to remove the moisture from the probe hole:

I took my blow dryer and blew air toward the probe for a few minutes then tried the oven again. It turned on but the icon on the front changed to 'push probe in'. I did then re-pushed the start button to 450 and it worked!

There were other variations on that same theme, but HowToMendIt.com provided a wealth of advice, including some other types of suggestions. The entire thread is here.

This got me curious. What did KitchenAid's own website say about the matter? So I went to KitchenAid.com and typed in the search "remove probe." The result?

Your search for remove probe returned 0 results.

I then checked the "Customer Care" menu on the website. Its options?

PRODUCT REGISTRATION
LOCATE MANUALS & GUIDES
WARRANTY & SERVICE PLANS
CONTACT US

After some further hunting and burrowing, I eventually found a link to http://www.kitchenaidconversations.com/. I eventually figured out how to bypass the registration (they didn't support Facebook Connect) and got to a search area. I typed in "remove probe," and I waited.

And waited.

And waited.

After a few minutes, HowToMendIt.com looked much, much better than KitchenAid's own customer care. Incidentally, HowToMendIt.com is provided by Amos Media Ltd. While Amos Media apparently prefers to be under the radar, they seem to specialize in these self-help kinds of websites - http://www.fixed4free.com/, http://www.mendmy.com/.

Although I wonder - if Kitchen Aid's own self-help website wasn't so hard to find and so slow, would people even go to the Amos Media sites?