Internet Justice

Ever been the subject of a little of life's unfairness and wished you could do something about it?  Take a cue from this guy and his tale of woe.

Dave Carroll, a guitarist from Halifax, Nova Scotia, had a rather unpleasant experience while traveling on United Airlines in 2008.  In his own words:

In the spring of 2008, Sons of Maxwell were traveling to Nebraska for a one-week tour and my Taylor guitar was witnessed being thrown by United Airlines baggage handlers in Chicago. I discovered later that the $3500 guitar was severely damaged. They didn’t deny the experience occurred but for nine months the various people I communicated with put the responsibility for dealing with the damage on everyone other than themselves and finally said they would do nothing to compensate me for my loss.

Most folks would seethe over this for a while and probably find an attorney to take the case, but most folks aren't accomplished musicians with a little web savvy.  Carroll decided the best way to deal with his loss was to write a song about it called "United Breaks Guitars", which led to this music video that has been viewed over 4.9 million times:

After seeing this thing go viral on the Internet, you would think that United Airlines would consider addressing the man's grievances.  Replacing a $3,500 guitar could generate a lot of good will for an industry that could really use it, right?  Well, apparently not.  His guitar was eventually repaired at his own expense and United did little more than apologize.  So Carroll did the only thing he could do: he wrote another song and released the video yesterday.

Will this bring his story to a happy ending?  We hope for their sake that United Airlines doesn't need a trilogy of his work to come to their senses, but if they do, I'm sure the third song will be a hit.  I'm going to check out the rest of this guy's musical catalog real soon.