Chapter 4: The LinkedIn War

Chapter 4: The LinkedIn War

The clock on the laptop screen ticked over to 14:04. The sixty-minute deadline had expired. The phone, sitting dark and silent on the desk, was Olympus Sports’ final, arrogant answer. They had called his bluff.

A strange calm settled over Liam. The simmering rage of the past hour cooled into something harder, colder. He had given them a chance. He had offered them an out, a simple, quiet resolution. They had not only slammed the door in his face but had the audacity to offer him a €20 voucher to wipe his bloody nose with. They had dismissed him. They had filed him under ‘insignificant’.

“Right then,” he said, the words cutting through the tense silence of the room.

Aoife, who had been watching him with a mixture of fear and pride, put a steadying hand on his shoulder. “Are you sure about this, Liam? What if they get… legal?”

“Let them,” Liam said, his eyes not leaving the screen. He wasn't just a man on disability from a small town in Ireland anymore. He was a former logistics manager, a man who had spent fifteen years inside the corporate machine. He knew that the only thing a company like Olympus Sports feared more than a lawsuit was a public relations nightmare that could damage its share price. Lawsuits could be buried in paperwork for years. A viral post on the right platform could cost them millions in brand value by morning.

He closed the email tab. He closed the courier tracking page. He opened a new tab and the familiar blue and white interface of LinkedIn loaded onto the screen. This wasn't Facebook, where a rant might be seen by his aunt and a few old school friends. This was the corporate world's own backyard. It was the digital golf course, the exclusive club where CEOs and directors preened, posted about corporate synergy, and kept a close eye on their own professional brand. An attack here wasn't a customer complaint; it was a professional indictment.

His fingers flew across the keyboard, not in a furious, messy tirade, but with the chilling precision of a surgeon. He wasn't writing as a wronged customer anymore. He was writing as a peer, as a professional highlighting a catastrophic failure in business process and customer experience.

He started the post.

An Open Case Study: A Masterclass in How to Alienate Your Irish Customer Base. Courtesy of Olympus Sports.

He paused, rereading the title. It was perfect. It was professional, slightly sarcastic, and framed the issue not as a personal grievance, but as a business school lesson in incompetence.

He began to lay out the narrative, using the notes he had meticulously compiled. He didn't use emotive language. He used the cold, hard language of business.

“Objective: To purchase a Christmas gift for my son. Action: Utilised the Olympus Sports Ireland website (olympussports.ie), which prices exclusively in Euro, to purchase a single item. At no point during the user journey—from product page to checkout—was it disclosed that the item would ship from the UK.”

He continued, a digital prosecutor building his case.

“Result: An unexpected and undisclosed customs charge of €47.00, representing a 52% surcharge on the original purchase price. The product is now held hostage by the courier pending this payment.”

Now, for the knife.

*“Attempted Resolution - A System Designed to Fail:”*

He detailed the labyrinth of indifference he had been forced to navigate. He named the names from his notepad. “Initial contact with agent ‘Chloe’ resulted in a refusal to escalate. Subsequent contact with ‘Raj’ of the ‘escalations team’ resulted in a false promise of a manager callback within 48 hours. This promise was not kept.”

He attached a screenshot of the “full and final” resolution email. He drew a neat red box around the offer of the €20 voucher.

“The Insult: After multiple failures in customer service, the ‘full and final resolution’ offered was a €20 e-voucher, contingent on further spending with the company. This represents less than half the value of the erroneous charge and is a deeply insulting attempt to deflect corporate responsibility.”

He could feel Aoife’s grip tighten on his shoulder as she read the words taking shape on the screen. He was taking their private struggle and pinning it up on a public wall for the entire business world to see.

Now came the masterstroke. The part that would transform this from a simple post into a guided missile. He clicked the '@' symbol. A search box appeared. He typed "Olympus Sports." The company page appeared. He clicked on "People." A list of hundreds of employees appeared.

He scrolled, ignoring the low-level agents and store managers. He was looking for the top of the mountain.

He found the CEO. @Jonathan Finch. Tag. He found the Chief Financial Officer. @Alistair Browne. Tag. He found the Head of European Operations. @Marcus Thorne. Tag. He found the Director of E-commerce. @Sarah Jennings. Tag. He found the Head of Customer Experience. @David Chen. Tag. And for good measure, the Head of Public Relations. @Eleanor Vance. Tag.

Each name was a payload. Each tag was a notification that would ping directly to that executive's phone and email. His complaint would not be filtered by a complaints department. It would not be buried in a 3-5 working day queue. It would land directly in the laps of the people whose job it was to prevent exactly this kind of public disaster. He was bypassing the foot soldiers and kicking down the door to the war room.

He added a final, devastating paragraph.

“This is not a simple customer service issue. This is a systemic failure of transparency and a deceptive business practice targeting your Irish market. My request was simple: honour the price you advertised. You refused. My final ultimatum, a 60-minute deadline for a manager to call, was ignored. You have chosen this public forum. I now consider this a matter of public interest. How will you be resolving this, @Jonathan Finch?”

He stared at the screen. The entire story was there. The deceit. The stonewalling. The insult. The ultimatum. It was a perfect, self-contained narrative of corporate arrogance. His digital ghost was about to haunt their sterile, glass-and-steel headquarters.

He glanced up and saw Finn’s drawing of the footballer in the shimmering black kit, stuck to the fridge with a magnet. The pure, uncomplicated joy in those crayon lines filled him with a fierce, protective resolve. This wasn’t just for him. It was for his son. It was for the simple magic of Christmas that a multi-million Euro company had tried to tax.

He took a deep breath. Aoife squeezed his shoulder, a silent signal of her unwavering support.

His mouse hovered over the blue ‘Post’ button.

He clicked.

The post appeared on his timeline, stark and official. The first shot in the war had been fired. In the quiet of their small living room, it felt as loud as a cannon blast. Now, they could only wait for the echo.