By Dave Lieber
watchdog@star-telegram.com
My first real newspaper job is the same job I have now, only different in a big way. It's 1980. I'm the new kid at a paper in southwest Florida. My first assignment is to take over a nationally syndicated consumer column called "Check It Out."
What do I check out? Commercials from Madison Avenue mad men and their sometimes overstated claims in TV and print advertising. When a TV ad comes on that makes a strong claim I can test, I grab a pen and copy the words. Next week's column.
Duncan Hines double-fudge brownies claim to be "so moist they cling."
Plush is "better than any other carpet spot cleaner."
"Particular people pick Peter Pan" peanut butter.
I hate the job. Can't come to terms with such small stories about brownies and peanut butter. Embarrassed that I have to round up children to brush their teeth for a toothpaste test (Aim says it's "the fluoride toothpaste children prefer"). Woodward and Bernstein didn't start this way. But I have no choice.
Precisely because of those
Washington Post reporters, there are so many applicants for so few starting newspaper jobs that I am lucky enough to have any job, even if I have to write this column with a cheesy but descriptive name.
At the time, I am too young to realize this silly column is teaching me the most important lesson I need to remember during the next 30 years of daily newspaper work.
Now, thousands of stories later, I am doing the same job. Only as I say, it's different in a big way.
The
Star-Telegram Watchdog column, in its eighth year, is a repository for all stories sad, bad and seemingly unsolvable. Exaggerated advertising claims seem the least of our problems.
We are more concerned about survival, about staying afloat, staying healthy, fighting corporate greed and fending off lone wolf scammers who masquerade as contractors, lottery officials, even police. It's a more challenging world.
I didn't care if the brownies stuck together. Today, as Watchdog, it's impossible not to care about the people I meet.
There's a senior citizen who paid $1,130 to a Haltom City upholsterer for work on her custom-made sofa and love seat. She sees neither the upholsterer nor her furniture again. The upholsterer's phone is disconnected. His place of business is vacant. (Stan N., please call to give your side of the story.)
There's the 84-year-old woman who sells her mineral rights to a businessman, or thinks she has. She's not sure.
"I signed papers, which I failed to read," she says. "After he left, I looked at the paper. My signature was on it, but the rest of the page was blank. You probably can't help me, but I think someone should know about this scammer. I'm too embarrassed to tell anyone how dumb I am."
There's a one-page contract I keep as a reminder for how a contract should not look. The man who gave it to me says he paid $3,200 to another man who started the work on his Springtown home but never returned.
This handwritten scribbled contract is a list of to-do items with no price breakdown. Too amateurish to be a proper legal contract between two parties. "I never meant it to be a bona fide lawful contract," the homeowner explains. "It was just a guideline to go by." And that's exactly what the contractor did. Go bye.
And there's a former customer service representative of a top-tier U.S. bank who tells me her story because, she says, she wants to free her conscience:
"The customer service reps are instructed to sell more than help. At the mortgage call center, folks would be told something different every time they called. When a homeowner was about to lose his home, his calls were transferred to a toll-free number. All of the lines were busy, always."
Thirty-plus years ago, problems for the everyday person were not so serious and pervasive as they are today. What's different now? My theory: any Joe Blow can claim to run a business, and with that, take your credit card information and disappear. That's always been the case.
But it's a recent development in history that the charming but incompetent Joe has access to a practically free international advertising platform.
With his own page on the World Wide Web, Joe can sell anything to anybody anywhere. And just as easily, he can cheat them, too. His risk of getting caught is nil.
I was too young to understand this at the time, but that annoying first job served as the cornerstone for the rest of my career. It showed me what I needed to do, always, not only at work, but in my personal life, too.
The same goes for you. It's the only way to survive this complicated, connected and crazy world.
No matter what it is, check it out.
The Watchdog column appears Fridays and Sundays.Dave Lieber, 817-390-7043Twitter: @davelieber
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