Dave Lieber’s new & expanded Watchdog Nation

Dave Lieber’s Watchdog Nation: Bite Back When Businesses and Scammers do you Wrong
Yankee Cowboy Publications, Keller, Texas, 2010, second edition (revised & expanded)

$20, and worth every penny.

ISBN-10: 0970853025

ISBN-13: 978-0970853028

I’ve been meaning to write this book review for a while, and kept putting it off. Partly because I was busy using the book myself. Since I started following these tips of Lieber’s closely I have changed my phone company, my electric company, and my Internet service. In those few acts alone I’ve paid for the book several times over. But the thing that set me to writing finally was a story a friend told me last week that made me want to kick something. Like a crooked roofing contractor.

My friend has been living in straightened circumstances for a number of years, getting by, but putting off a lot of things that needed doing. Finally, he could no longer put off having his flat-roofed Frank Lloyd Wright-style bungalow re-roofed. I had a real good one to recommend, who has done work for me a couple of times, and came to me via a contractor friend who has also worked for me a couple of times. My neighbors have also used and liked him. Word of mouth and satisfied customers is a good way to find a roofer. But my friend was trying to cut corners so he took the lowball bid from a guy who knew someone he knew. . . not a great introduction.

That job was slow, it was sloppy, and when torrential rains during the job got the house wet, everything turned musty and damp, and tar dripped down spots the inside walls. They didn’t finish promptly, they actually didn’t finish it. The rocks that need to be taken onto the roof are still in the side yard. The roofer had no insurance to pay for the damage to the house.

The worst (you mean, that’s not bad enough?) was discovered last week. The roofers (the only people allowed in this otherwise locked yard with very tall fences and gates) stole several expensive items. The theft was disguised by simply leaving behind the boxes and cases. A new pool pump, a good circular saw, the only evidence of their original habitation there are their empty boxes. Had my friend followed my recommendation, he would have had the job done for about the same quote as this fly-by-night roofer. And he wouldn’t have been out the hardware around the house or all of the time and expense of repairing the house now.

I’m sorry I didn’t write this review earlier, because I would have sent a copy of it to my friend and said “Do what Dave suggests – look at the local reviews, check with the BBB (Better Business Bureau), get personal recommendations from people you trust.” The bid price isn’t a bargain if the job isn’t done right, isn’t done at all, or is done so wrong as to cause more damage than a simply leaking roof will do.

I’ve sent copies of pages of this book to people. My brother received the pages (114-15) to do with complaining to the post office. It turns out that you CAN complain, you don’t have to take the desk clerk’s shrugged “that’s tough, you only paid for Priority, it wasn’t insured,” when you complain about something that went wrong that was under their control. (It seems the Artesia, CA, post office has a special drop-kick-and-thrash machine for both envelopes and packages, and special delay of weeks on delivering Priority mail.)

There was a woman at Lowe’s hardware in Fort Worth, TX, who was buying fans, and mentioned, “I have to set up an electric company in this new house. I suppose I’m stuck with TXU.” The clerk and I simultaneously said “NO!” but I was the one who was able to tell her how to do a good search to make a choice – “Go to Dave Lieber’s Watchdog Nation (http://www.watchdognation.com/) web site and look for his articles about how to choose an electric company.”

Dave Lieber is the consumer advocate columnist with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and he solves this kind of problem and shares the whys and wherefores with his readers for a living. This guy is good. He’s smart, he’s efficient, and I bet when he phones and has someone by the short hairs because of their company’s poor customer service, he’s a bit of a pain in the ass (though I do believe him when he says he tries really hard to be super polite, because he records his calls and if he needs to use them as evidence, he doesn’t want to sound like the bully in the conversation). And that old honey versus vinegar thing. I wish I had his discipline – I’ve had to hang up on some of these folks, telling them “I’m so angry at you I can’t be polite any more. Goodbye.” At least I learned from Dave to stop before I became rude, not slog forward and accomplish little.

Early in the book Lieber notes that 15 minutes a day to solve some of these problems may be the way to pace yourself, to not feel overwhelmed if you have several issues to solve. That’s a good strategy. And keep a separate folder and page of notes for each business and each call. Take names, real names, if possible.

I’ve glossed over a few of the tricks that Dave Lieber discusses in this little gem of a book. You’ll have to read it to find his descriptions of how to make these techniques work. His chapters are each no longer than a typical newspaper column, so you can read through this book a short chapter at a time, or read through it cover to cover in one sitting.

I still have work to do – my local Fort Worth cable company has the most obtuse billing system and the most inefficient customer service clerks I’ve ever encountered. Just try to get a credit to show up on your bill. They apply it to the “taxes and other charges” but it never seems to actually make the balance drop. So I’m still working on that. And on that, my best contact method is another one of Dave’s recommendations (and at least they’re pleasant to talk to, if their efforts still go for naught) is to type my frustration regarding this company into a line of my Twitter feed. Use the pound sign (hashmark) # with no space before the company name to make it easier for them to find your remarks. They’ll usually figure out who you are and actually call pretty quickly. I’ve heard from them within 30 minutes. Who knew?

One of the other really important things Dave comments on is to say “thank you” when it due. I’ve used tweets and written blog entries where appropriate to do just that. So this book review is also a blog entry and a “thank you” to Dave Lieber for a job really well done. I’m happy with the choices I’ve made, but I don’t feel obligated to stay with these companies forever and ever, if they do me wrong. That’s a good lesson!

Now, go ask a bunch of questions!

The Company I Keep

It’s time to make some changes. The electric company, the phone company, all of my home, auto, and flood insurance, and possibly even phone and Internet. (Sometimes you get on a roll, and decide to take on all of them!) So first thing I did was go to Dave Lieber’s Watchdog Nation site and re-read his article about saving money by changing electric companies, information I will apply to my various services and utilities.

This afternoon, I’m comparing electric companies. There is the basic information, based upon my zip code, that I can find at http://www.powertochoose.org. And then there is the spec sheet for each company where you decide if you want variable, fixed, indexed, whatever. Read those sheets—because the rate offered in the comparison charts is their best rate. And be sure to notice that after he tells you to “pick your poison,” you need to go to the site and see what the fine print is.

Why read the fine print? Because if you’re thinking of skipping Brilliant (they charge a $200 early termination fee) over Gexa, who charges only $150 for early termination (they both have a six month fixed rate plan) then you’ll miss the point that while Brilliant charges that same rate if you use 500, 1000, or 2000kwh, Gexa only gives you that low rate if you use 2000kWh. Less usage gets a higher rate. I see by my TXU bill graph over the last 12 months that I only hit 2000kwh twice that would have earned me the lowest rate, and there were two months when I was under 500kWh, getting me the least savings. So my rates during the 8 remaining months plus the two really low-usage months would have been higher than the price you see on the PowerToChoose chart. See how it works?

You also learn in the fine print that the reason YEP gives you a discount is "Because this is an E-Plan, your initial pricing as listed above also includes and assumes a 0.5¢/kWh discount for electing to authorize monthly payments of your invoices via automatic recurring withdrawals from your bank account(s) or charges to your credit card.” Give them automatic access to my bank account or credit card? I don’t think so! What happens if we have a disagreement?

Then there are the complaints.

I looked at these statistics going back a couple of years and drew lines under the companies I’m considering on a printout. (You may need to get creative with your printer during this research, some of these folks produce really non-standard sizes that don’t print easily. There’s probably a reason for that.) More complaints overall, fewer this month, but maybe last year they had fewer over all. Figure out what is a reasonable statistical spread for you and decide if the complaints from other people are going to influence your choice of a company that looks like a good fit. The easiest format for understanding the complaints is in viewing the Complaint Summary, because it gives actual complaint numbers, not just percentages. A 50 percent leap in complaints sounds like a lot until you see that they went from 2 to 3 in the reporting period. You can open individual graphs for each company from this index.

I haven’t finished my research yet; I’ve given myself a couple of hours this afternoon to do my poking around for this bill. And I’ll do the same this evening on the insurance, since the renewal dates are coming up (if I wasn’t keeping track of this myself I’d know by the mail coming to the house—some of this information is apparently public record, and other insurance companies send reminders and suggest I give them a try.)

It’s a new year, I have lots of expenses coming along when soon both kids will be in college, so the least I can do is beat some of the household expenses into submission. As a note for those who use Social Media: I will send a Twitter remark before I tackle Charter (they’re on my list) because last time I complained there, I heard from the company Twit, asking if he could help. Why yes, you can!

;-D

Kay Bailey Hutchison holds Bogus “town hall meeting” conference call

The phone rang while I was in the middle of fixing dinner, and offered a town hall style phone meeting. I’ve heard these before, our Congresswoman Kay Granger holds them occasionally. I pushed “O” to get into the queue to ask Hutchison a question, and then was treated to 30 minutes of Republican party propaganda and scare tactics, with softball questions lobbed her way by party members with down-home local accents, posting concerned questions about the end of Health Care As We Know It. Heaven forbid that women have the choice or coverage for abortion services, or that a public option be considered. And that precious “doctor/patient relationship” – you know, the one that your insurance company dictates with an iron fist – that was at risk.

It didn’t take long to figure out Democrats weren’t going to get to talk on this call. While at first I figured they must have dialed my phone by accident, after listening to the production values of the “meeting,” I am more convinced that it was a devious plan to try to make me listen to their political nonsense and be swayed by it. The only thing missing at the end was “This political ad was paid for by the elect Hutchinson for Governor campaign.”

What production values? The same ones that come into play on talk radio programs. I am familiar with those on KERA-FM, public radio. If I’m waiting to speak, I’m listening to the conversation seven seconds old. That delay is so if someone totally inappropriate comes on, they can zap it before it ever gets onto the air. Each of Kay’s “callers” was confused as to whether they were being spoken to because, it seems, they were listening to the delayed conversation, and the voice breaking in 7 seconds before the previous call ended was confusing.

But this could be a tactic also, to make it sound real. Because I’m convinced it wasn’t. I think it was a staged program in which Democrats were called but not allowed to talk. It is my hunch that the Hutchison campaign hoped to run their party line past the listening Democrats, trying to scare them with the “don’t let government take over health care” claims, and the suggestion that Canada and the United Kingdom have terrible health care. They don’t–it is actually quite good. And if you think those countries have “rationing,” just look at what American insurance companies are doing. They’re practicing medicine without a license, and they’re rationing, based upon what they will or won’t pay for.

What was I going to ask? I wanted to tell her to listen to this constituent–I want her to vote for this health care reform plan, not drag her feet to prevent progress. And I wanted to suggest she sit down in a one-on-one conversation with Dennis Kucinich and really learn what the issues are.

So I think she needs to come clean. Mrs. Hutchison, that wasn’t REALLY a town hall meeting, was it? That was a prolonged political trick to try to scare rational people into thinking Republicans have been shut out of the process (you walked away from it of your own free will, M’am) and that the reforms being proposed will end life as we know it.

Yes, I hope indeed that it does. And when 30 million additional people in America finally get health coverage, and the rest of us get fair coverage, and small businesses suddenly can compete on a more level playing field because in one way or another everyone will have health insurance, I think we’ll see a lot of other things improve for everyone. Too bad you chose not to be a part of it, Kay.

Darwin, Lamark, Galton, and the American Museum of Natural History

If you’re interested in tracing the history of scientific thought, of how ideas evolved, were viewed, practiced, and how they ultimately could go terribly wrong to effect social policy in an adverse way, there is perhaps no better place to start than with the birth of Evolution and how it affected popular culture and governmental behavior. One can go back to ancient civilizations, religions, and philosophy to study this, but for sheer charisma, the heinous interpretations and actions resulting from the misunderstandings of Darwin’s important work are current today. And the antidote of more information and common sense is not far away, if one goes searching for it.

I did graduate work in Environmental Philosophy at the University of North Texas for several years, and while my employment today doesn’t often entail using the understanding of earlier world views, it remains a strong interest. In conversation if I encounter someone who is interested in but unfamiliar with the topic, I have one favorite essay as a starting place to give a comprehensive view of how codified Social Darwinism came to be. “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908 – 36,” in Donna Haraway’s Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (Rutledge, 1989) is a great starting point. Who knew that the eugenics ideas adopted at a natural history museum could end up strongly influencing how inspections would be conducted at Ellis Island, and eventually the drafting of restrictive, Social Darwinist immigration quotas in 1921 and 1924?

Today, I found an essay in DailyKOS, “Big Mike and the Paper Hanger,” that I’ll print and tuck into the Haraway book. It’s a very nice overview of science and mathematics going off the rails when enough information and good techniques aren’t available (or weren’t completely understood at the time).

Charles Darwin’s half cousin, Francis Galton, like Jean-Baptiste Lamark, contributed a great deal to modern science, but along the way, got some of it terribly wrong. Modern scientists have found more suitable applications for some of these important theories, and discarded others. As these early scientists and mathematicians looked for applications for their theories, civilizations literally trembled, and the poor and the apparently genetically inferior were dealt with.

In my collection of books from a family estate is one from 1877 called The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and Heredity, by R.L. Dugdale, Member of the Executive Committee of the Prison Association, NY. Mine is the fourth printing from 1888, Putnam. It’s quite a vile slim volume that comes from a collection called “Questions of the Day.” The index doesn’t list sources, but the book may well contain reference to Galton. This perverse application of a pseudo science is a relic that one would hope is of bygone days, yet today we have hate-mongers and racists spouting similar ideas. Ethnic cleansing is happening today in war zones around the world; and here at home attitudes toward immigration and immigrants are as bigotted as the old Chinese exclusion act. There is no fact, only subjective opnion, behind the hysteria preached on some of the popular news networks. It comes straight out of Galton’s misapplied “science.” The realism of the 1920s fed into the surreal Nazi behavior of the 1930s and 1940s. We’ve settled back into the realism mode, where suggestion and innuendo place immigrants with darker skin as inferior and who must be blocked or deported.

I look forward to the rest of this book, by whoever is behind the moniker Devilstower.

Oops. Our Bad.

Tarrant County Child Support Office, Redux

Ten years ago this month I began an awkward contradanse, partnered by (shackled to) the Tarrant County Child Support Office. The divorce was finalized on October 11, 1999. By law, parents are compelled to use this system, so I filed forms as directed and have paid $24 a year for them to “process” my bi-monthly child support checks. I’ve seen checks mailed, I’ve received the federal checks forwarded, I’ve seen a couple of different versions of “direct deposit.” I changed my bank account and direct deposit in 2005 after a burglary. We have a lot of history and there were many occasions for them to consider their handling of my account.

My children must roll their eyes and are probably sick to death of my complaints about the Child Support office, but it has been difficult to hold it in.

“I know you want your allowance. We have to wait for the check.”

“You want to go do something that involves money? I’m sorry, the check is late. We all have to wait.”

In the early days I called that office in tears, asking if I could drive down and pick up the check. “No. And we won’t address complaints until it is more than two weeks late.” Yes, keeping some back in case it’s late is a common practice, but it doesn’t always work out. The check is from the feds, they send it out like clockwork. The Child Support office has seemed, on the other hand, to use a lottery to decide what day of the week the thing will be forwarded to the bank. This is an exquisite way of making life miserable for anyone who wants to pay bills on time. There is the sucker punch I mentioned in an earlier blog, of sending the check precisely on time for two or three payments so you begin to relax and think they might have a new system in place, only to send the next check a day shy of two weeks late.

If you’re expecting a check near the big holidays, you’re just Shit Out Of Luck, because the ladies down at the Child Support office take extra days off, so while it’s a special time of year and you’d like to finish your shopping for that Thanksgiving meal or the stocking stuffers or ham for Christmas dinner, that check won’t arrive until after the holiday. It never fails. Ten years of this. If I didn’t have generally very good health, this would have sent me to find my blood pressure cuff.

When I posted a rant against the Tarrant County Child Support folks in a customer service blog a few weeks ago, I was resigned to dealing with that inept office for another year, until my youngest graduates from high school. But they’re getting in one last sucker punch.

In early October circumstances required that I set up a new bank account. I scrambled to send notifications to all who either deposit directly or who automatically pull funds from the old account. Just before the new account was set up, a child support check was deposited.

The Tarrant County Domestic Relations folks don’t keep that direct deposit form online, so I emailed and asked for a form and explained that they shouldn’t deposit any future checks to the old account. The form came quickly in the mail, I sent it off the same day, and a couple of days later I found another letter from the Child Support Office. It announced:

Tarrant County Child Support Office is unable to process your request for direct deposit because your account has been redirected to Texas Child Support State Disbursement Unit (SDU). Your child support payments will be coming from the Texas State Disbursement Unit in San Antonio.”

San Antonio? Did they read my old blog and decide to get even?

October 21 rolls around, time for another child support check. I log on to my account information page (the one with the little white girl in a school outfit and knee-high socks sitting in their banner) and I see another check received. So if they’re not depositing it but they have it in hand, then they’ll be mailing it. This has happened before.

Many trips to the post office, and no check. On October 27 I called San Antonio to ask what was up. They have me in their system but I don’t have a 10 digit account number, so I can’t log on. They are aware that they’ll be depositing my checks now, and think they might be depositing the current one, but they don’t have my new bank information yet. The next morning I call Tarrant County.

“We mailed your check on the 21st,” I was told by the customer service clerk.

“It’s the 28th, it doesn’t take a week for that check to travel 10 miles. Please look in your system,” I asked.

“Oh. We mailed it to San Antonio.”

“Do you see the problem here? Why wasn’t it mailed directly to me? Is that office going to be as inept as yours has, at never getting the checks out on time? Why was it transferred there anyway?”

“It was a glitch in our system. We haven’t handled disbursements since 1994, when all of it started being handled in San Antonio.”

“So the reason mine is late all of the time is because you don’t do these much? How come you didn’t notice this mistake for 10 years when you were handling my check every two weeks?”

“It fell through the cracks. We don’t do many of these except the ones that we were handling from pre-1994.”

“And that other office, are they going to be as haphazard with the payment dates as your office has been?”

“All they do is process checks. It should go smoother.”

I was remarkably calm and polite; I felt that this clerk must be hoping I didn’t verbally flay her for 10 years of torture at their hands. Charles Dickens couldn’t dream up a more excruciatingly inept agency, except maybe the Post Office.

I still don’t have the check, nine days later. Keep your chin up, Pip.

Goodbye, Cargill: I’ll never buy hamburger again

. . . confidential grinding logs and other Cargill records show that the hamburgers were made from a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps that were ground together at a plant in Wisconsin. The ingredients came from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas and Uruguay, and from a South Dakota company that processes fatty trimmings and treats them with ammonia to kill bacteria.

Enough is enough.

The opening quote is a portion of an article in the October 3, 2009, New York Times called “Woman’s Shattered Life Shows Ground Beef Inspection Flaws,” by Michael Moss, that is every bit as sickening to this modern reader as The Jungle was to readers in 1906.

The packing houses today are as corrupt in their parsing out of scraps and smattering of tests as they were when Upton Sinclair wrote his socialist manifesto. We hear about meat recalls regularly, but was I alone in assuming the government and commercial entities cared about eliminating unsafe meat? That they were doing their best to protect consumers, to prevent this from happening again? Apparently I’m in a large majority of consumers who missed which shell the ball was under when trying to shop at the Three Card Monte meat counter. This story has sent me hastening to my kitchen to dig out the Kitchenaid food grinder attachment. I have one and I know how to use it, and now it’s time to do more than grind carrots for salad. I’ll be making my own ground beef.

My friend Dean Crabtree, a smart man who is often ahead of the curve in food preparation and preservation (he’s my canning guru), this afternoon talked me through a crash course in choosing a cut of beef roast to use and how much fat to retain to grind my own burgers. And my mother, who read widely and would send me clippings regularly, years ago sent a snippet about handling meat: wash or spray it with vinegar and you’ll kill the bad stuff, including E. coli.

At this rate, in my rapid conversion as an eater of healthier meat, I’ll probably end up making my own sausage also.

I thought I was being careful and eating healthily. I cook meat to the right temperature, I handle it safely, I wash surfaces and my hands and the handles and crevices on knives. As far as cuts of meat, I have let more fat creep into my diet for sound reason—we need it to digest our food and for flavor. But this—I didn’t intend to let the scraps on the floor and out of the evisceration troughs onto my plate, topped with a slurry of E. coli gravy. To read about the offal that is going into our meat, and how poorly it is handled, is sickening.

Never one to leave an obvious detail hanging, I looked around for information about vinegar. From Nurse’s Notebook http://www.nursesnotebook.com, I found the following:

Researchers have looked at how vinegar might help protect us from foodborne illness. A Japanese study cited by many local extension services showed that vinegar inhibited the growth of the nasty E.coli 0157:H7 bacteria. Salt and heat enhanced the antibacterial action and sugar decreased it.[5] Marinating your meat with a vinegar and sea salt marinade is not only tasty, but can help protect you from E. coli infection.

Visit the page for the rest of the article and the footnote links.