When a boatbuilder disappoints customers so much that one of them emails me, and another sets up a 'complaint blog', that might simply be misfortune.
But to land yourself with yet another angry customer who not only seizes your name for their own website but also sets up a YouTube channel - well, that sounds like carelessness.
Maesbury Marine Services was one of the first boatbuilders to try starting a blog, nearly 5 years ago, but it didn't get past the first post. Probably just as well; small boatbuilders need to satisfy the customer before they spend time on self-promotion. At the time I wrote:
Only one post for Maesbury so far, on Jan 26th. Will it go any further? Maesbury has a good reputation as a boatbuilder. As a blogger, well, I can only hope!
I hoped too much. It was a one-post wonder, and Maesbury went back to a conventional website, including a page listing the boats they'd built, called 'Completed Projects'.
But shortly thereafter the guy who owned the Maesbury-built Lockstock was in touch with me by email. He was surprised by my reference to 'a good reputation' and listed his complaints.
And a couple of years later the owner of another Maesbury boat, Westwood, started a blog complaining of the Maesbury workmanship. In fact Westwood started several - one of them called Narrowboatbotchers - as well as comment-spamming me in his frustration to publicise the case. But he removed them again after Maesbury owner Barry Tuffin sent around the boys got solicitors to threaten libel action.
Now yet another dissatisfied Maesbury customer has surfaced: The people who commissioned Hydrophobia.
The unhappy customers are not only using a website with the Maesbury name in the URL but also a YouTube channel - Hydrophobiacation - to get their point across.
YouTube is the new angle in customer complaints. You can argue the toss as to who promised what and when, and who owes whom money, and which belongs where, but it's tricky to argue against video evidence of workmanship.
Mind you, it might have been a hostage to fortune to name a narrowboat Hydrophobia in the first place. Someone's bound to get bitten.
If you've got a beef against a boatbuilder, my instinct would be not to seize their own name as a URL. This is a temptation too far for lawyers, arguably unfair, and there's probably case law about it. Of course, to continue the rabies metaphor, it depends on how securely you feel the chain is holding the dogs of law.
If I was considering which boatbuilder to use and I knew that one had gone to law to suppress a customer's complaints, I wouldn't want to use him at all. Especially where he's still using the boat as an example of his work on his website - as Maesbury still seems to be doing in this case.
But, fair's fair, if the boatbuilder feels he's got a case - and he's entitled to a defence, after all - what should he do? I believe he should blog, or at least he should link to all his customer blogs, good as well as bad. I've already found other boatbuilders doing this, and one is even tweeting about it. Now, who'll be the first customer with an unhappy boatbuild experience to start tweeting?
See also:
Dos and don'ts of getting justice if you think your boat has been built badly
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