By Tom Dodge
Dallas, TX – In the Dodge household, we have always admired our daughter, Karen Hoover, for her lifelong refusal to allow herself to be a pi?ata for the rest of the world -to be whacked around by anyone and everyone hoping to enrich themselves in some way at her expense. Putting it in Oprah-speak, a victim. Over the years, when her brother Lowell and I are being over-charged by the check-out girl, sold the wrong part at the auto-part dealer, or muscled around by shoddy workmen, I usually look at Lowell and say, "What would Karen do?"
"Fire 'em at the first sign of incompetence," he says.
And since last month, I've decided to stand up for myself more than I used to. We were re-modeling our bathroom, and the plumbing company we've used for years with no trouble sent out a bad plumber to install a shower pan - usually a simple job, taking an average of two hours. But this plumber set off my bad-plumber alarm immediately when he asked to borrow my tools. Then he had to use the bathroom. Then he took a long break by sitting in his truck. Then he broke my drainpipe and had to go to the shop for a long time and bring back a new one. He borrowed more tools. Went to the bathroom. Took breaks. At the end of the first day, he still wasn't finished. Next day, same routine. The first shower pan he cut didn't fit. The second one was out of kilter and not laid in smoothly. He left pieces of concrete and other rubble underneath it. My bill was $575.00 - for eight hours' labor and a new drain pipe.
The tile man would not pour concrete over it until someone came out and re-installed it properly. The company sent out a good plumber to do the job right. I wrote to the plumbing foreman, explained what happened, and asked for my bill to be adjusted to a reasonable amount.
After a month and no reply, I wrote to the owner of the company, using all my skills of diplomacy. He called me immediately, promising to get to the bottom of the situation - and he did. Yesterday, the plumbing foreman called and offered to refund a third of the overcharge.
Lost in New Orleans recently, I drove over to the curb to ask directions. I spotted a parking meter officer coming and waited for him. I asked him how to get where I wanted to go. He told me, then wrote me a ticket for stopping on a red meter. Yikes!
I sent in the $15 but included a letter explaining what happened. I didn't consider my payment to be an admission of wrongdoing, I said. It was a contribution to a great city that had otherwise treated me so well during my stay there. No refund yet here either, but again, I didn't feel so much like a victim either.
I think others must be undergoing a kind of Karen Hooverization of the backbone as well. Last week I failed to see a restricted sign and accidentally parked in a space in the UTA parking lot belonging to someone who had paid extra to keep others out of it. When I got back after class, the campus police were waiting for me. "We had to talk him out of calling a tow-truck," they told me.
Tom Dodge is a writer from Midlothian.