Followers

Sunday 23 October 2011

Day 259: Throw Him a Fish (14/10/2011)

Trip Advisor is God.

In every town, in every country, people run hostels and hotels and Trip Advisor can make or break them.

One bad review can be the difference between a bustling bookings sheet and tumble weed in the corridors.

It wasn´t going to take long before the wierdos cottoned onto this and started posting false reviews to screw the competition or just out of sheer spite. A malicious poster was recently ordered to pay $300,000.00 in damages. This is a serious business.

Its probably best that the identity of those involved in this story are not revealed or I may end up in a South American court for perverting the course of justice, but the story is still worth telling.

False reviews started appearing on Trip Advisor for a place we stayed and very much enjoyed. Marmeduke and Philomena (not their real names, you understand) were very concerned. After a bit of detective work, they were pretty confident that they had identified the culprit. Warnings failed to have any effect and legal advice was sought.

It may all be over now.

The allegation was that a disgruntled expat was responsible. You can call him Florence. No one seemed to know what his reasons were but he appeared to have taken a dislike to Marmeduke, possibly because Philomena had declined his offer to kill a troublesome tradesman who had failed to complete a repair on time.

Florence was proud to tell everyone that he was a retired Navy Seal and had killed something in excess of two hundred people. I can´t be more precise because neither could he. I don´t know whether it is normal to lose count of the number of people you have killed. I think I would keep a careful record just in case anyone wanted to know at a later date, but then again, I like spreadsheets so maybe I am not like everyone else.

Also, to be fair to Florence, it wasn´t clear whether he killed all these people during the course of his professional life or whether he was including the people that he had killed whilst in semi retirement. Older people are not good with computers and perhaps he missed the evening class on spreadsheets. Then again, older people do like lists.

I just don´t know what to believe.

To complicate matters, during the course of her enquiries, Philomena came across another chap called Francois who also claimed to be a retired Navy Seal. The two Seals had fallen out after meeting at convention for retired Navy Seals. There were competing claims about who had more scalps. Words had been exchanged and there was some bad feeling. Some people may have been killed.

The plot thickens we we learn that the police and the courts in this country are, shall we say, partial to brown envelopes. The outcome of a hypotheical case brought by Philomena against Florence might be dictated by factors other than the evidence.

The tendency for brown envelopes to influence the turning of the wheels of justice has also led to the exercise of people power in this hamlet. Wrong doers, unpunished by the police, may or may not have been hauled out of jail and beaten to death by a hundred strong brigade of pitchfork brandishing locals, before their bodies were set on fire and thrown off the local bridge.

Which brings me back to Florence.

If he has killed two hundred people of more, then perhaps a hundred strong brigade of pitchfork brandishing locals might be best advised to think twice before taking him on. The odds aren´t that good for them.

But, then again, I don´t really think he was a Seal after all.

Seals like beachballs, not killing people. There is of course, only one way to tell.

Throw him a fish.


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