A couple years ago, I lost my temper and posted a couple rants about a local dive shop, Divers Supply here in Grand Cayman. Two years later on, I can see how pissed off I was when I wrote it because it truly was a rant, rather than a well-thought-out public shaming.

A few days after I posted the second part, Divester (shuttered now, but was part of Weblogs, Inc with astounding amounts of traffic) featured one of my underwater photos and in the little bio blurb about the photographer recapped the trouble I was having and linked back to my original post. Not only did that drive a crazy amount of traffic to the site, but also served to boost the "relevancy" of my post and propel it to the top of Google's search results for Divers Supply Grand Cayman where it's stayed to this very day.

Since then, in the one-page report that's emailed to me every night there have been at least one and sometimes up to four web search referalls from Google on those search words. That's a lot of eyeballs looking for this particular dive shop and having that oh-so-attention-grabbing f-bomb show up at the top of the list.

I was contacted first through comments and later by email by one of the employees who heard through the grapevine that he was taking a beating online. As it turned out, it wasn't even the right employee that I pretty much viciously character assassinated. I never heard a peep from Divers Supply, even though I did hear from people un-officially who knew the owner of the store. They asked if i thought he (the owner) had heard about it/read it and I said I doubted it, or something might have been done. In the end results, it was the store manager who fucked me over and really has no financial stake in the company.

This morning, however, I was contacted by an acquaintance who's still in the dive business down here. He said that his company would soon be doing 'quite a lot of business' with them in the future and having this appear at the top of the search results is pretty harmful. Would I, as a personal favor to him please take it down?

If other companies are worried about THEIR reputation by being associated with another who has such terrible customer service that they'd go out of their way to try and have it taken down, then what my post was trying to acheive has succeeded. I wrote him back, very cordially (even though he charged me full rack-rate for a 2-tank dive after their reservations manager booked me in at a courtesy rate) and told him that: "I doubt they're going to do anything now, but all they had to do was the right thing and replace the computer, or even just the module inside. Instead they treated me like dirt and not at all like a loyal customer who exclusively bought there and sent customers and students there for years, so I wrote that scathing recount. Perhaps if they had an urge to do the right thing and save their name, I would consider it. Maybe pressure from a business partner is just what they're in need of to push them along to that decision. A Stinger retails for $599, as does the D4. (quick Google search) I can guess that keyman is probably around 450, and dealer cost around 300. That's all that's standing between them and clearing their name."

He replied quickly after that "Thanks for the reply and I do understand your position. Not sure if I can do anything, but maybe it would be worth a try further down the line"