Follow Up to "I F-ing Hate Wal-Mart"

Wow.

So I didn’t really expect what just happened here at The Stonecipher Report today. As of this writing we have had over 100,000 hits today, and they don’t seem to be slowing down.

My brief story about a bad experience at Wal-Mart has apparently taken the social book marking sites by storm. It is the number one story on all of digg.com right now with 3,409, check that 3,412 diggs. It also hit at least number seven (above the fold) on reddit.com’s front page, but I never checked back to see if it got any higher.

While I’m thrilled to have all of this traffic, I’m a little disappointed that this happened with a piece like this.

I was literally sitting in the lobby of the hotel that I had just checked out of and I wanted to write a quick note to the regular 200 - 400 people who stopped and give them an update.

After a few sentences I felt the urge to carry on and vent a little bit about my rotten Wal-Mart experience, and then I posted it after scanning quickly for major errors. The whole thing took me about 20 minutes from start to finish.

Then I had a little more time so I figured, why not post it to digg and reddit and just see how this all plays out?

So that’s the story of one of the day’s biggest articles on two major social book marking sites.

Not much effort, turned into a lot of hype, which is great.

What truly amazes me however, is that, at this point, almost 1,000 more people have dugg my post than the number two post on digg.com which is titled "Bill Gates Retires Today".

That’s insane!

That means that at this point, more people in the wide world of digg.com actually chose to digg a story about some random blogger’s bad oil change at Wal-Mart rather than a piece about the richest man in the world retiring from one of the most well known companies on the planet.

The Rich Man will most likely catch me in number of diggs in a few hours, but that’s not the point. I guess the point is that as a relatively new blogger I’m still working to figure out what works and what doesn’t. And I just learned that a title may not be everything, but it can go a real long way.

As a side note, one of my fellow Top Ten popular posts on digg is really worth checking out. If there’s any justice this will eventually knock me out of the top spot. It’s called "The Douchiest Phone Message in History" and it is as funny as it sounds.

Back to the topic at hand, the story of the oil change has directly impacted my life today. There seems to have been more damage done by the people at Wal-Mart than simply trying to charge me for oil they didn’t put in. I’m not sure exactly what is wrong now, but the car won’t accelerate past 22 MPH. Not conducive for cross country road tripping.

As a result, I’m still here in Idaho Falls, ID. By the way, that is not where the incident took place. The incident occurred hundreds of miles to the west and is only now catching up to me.

So since I’ll be here for a while, my initial note telling everyone that I wouldn’t be posting much can be updated to check back regularly for more stuff cause all I have is a motel room, an internet connection a laptop and a blog.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by, including those of you who felt it necessary to question my sexuality or intelligence since I did not change my own oil. Keep coming back, I bet I can make you even more angry at me next time!

Also, look out for The Rick's response to me.