United Finally Comes Clean On Broken Guitar Issue

The perfect response.

from SFGate (The San Francisco Chronicle)

A Canadian musician who tried to get United to compensate him for a guitar that was tossed and damaged by a United worker retaliated with a YouTube video.

It all started on March 31, 2008. Dave Carroll and his Sons of Maxwell bandmates were sitting in a plane at O'Hare, waiting to disembark when a fellow passenger cried out:

"My God, they're throwing guitars out there."

They looked out the window. They saw a United worker tossing one of their guitars. Carroll discovered later that among those flying instruments was his $3,500 Taylor, which ended up smashed. And so began a nine month saga of trying to get United to pay for the damage. When the airline wouldn't, Carroll made a decision. He said on his site:

"I promised the last person to finally say 'no' to compensation ... that I would write and produce three songs about my experience with United Airlines and make videos for each to be viewed online by anyone in the world."

He followed through with his threat. He posted his country ode, "United Breaks Guitars," on YouTube Monday. Since then, the video has been viewed more than half a million times and is a hit with the media.

United apologized, plans to use the video internally to help "change its culture," and, according to a spokeswoman for the carrier:

"We are in conversation with one another to make what happened right."

The lesson here? Don't piss off a musician.

The modern version of "Don't piss off anyone who buys printing ink by the carload".

Yay!!! My ex and I once went to the Qantas fragile baggage pick-up in Adelaide to pick up his guitar.

There was nobody at the counter...so we peered through the crack in the swing doors to where the baggage was actually being unloaded off the carts.

We witnesed a Qantas baggage handler pick his guitar off the cart, hold it above his head, and deliberately throw it to the ground.

Hopefully our united yells of anger and bursting through the doors to yell at him discouraged this behaviour in future.

If only we had had a video!!!

the roches expressed concerns about planes and guitars 26 year ago

Yep, dj. Gives new meaning to "Fly the Friendly Skies of United."

(loved the Troubles song as well)