"Bad news is out the door and around the block before good news gets up out of bed." - My Husband

Boy, isn't this the truth. FoxNews has a shining example of this right now on their website, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,531515,00.html.

This poor guitarist had his guitar broken by a baggage handler of United Airlines. He tried for a year to get United to pay for the broken guitar, which cost $1,200 to fix. When United wouldn't pay, he made a video and posted it on YouTube, titled "United Breaks Guitars." Fox said the video had more than 600,000 hits by Thursday evening. It's Friday evening now, and it has 1,627,312: the last one being mine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo

The funny thing: United wants to use the video as a training video on how to handle customer complaints in the future.

Now, what would have happened if United had actually paid this claim like they should have? Nothing would have been told about this at all. But instead, this incident is all over the news. Even Oprah is all over it. United gets a bad reputation (which they deserve after this) and I want to go buy a Sons of Maxwell album, even though I have never heard of them before now.

It's very sad when United's version of Quality Assurance equals a passenger looking out the window and yelling, "Hey! They're throwing guitars out there!" The baggage handlers started the slippery slope by not treating their customers the way they should be treated. Their supervisor failed by not correcting what they were doing. The management failed by not reimbursing a claim and essentially saying the baggage handlers acted appropriately. I believe this is one company that needs more help and training than even an excellent YouTube video can provide.