When I first started expressing my skepticism of global warming, the general consensus was that the world was getting significantly warmer and human beings were the primary cause. As a result of a few email messages implicating global warming “scientists” in a plot to fudge the data, the pendulum has suddenly swung the other way. (See The Wall Street Journal story, “Global Warming With the Lid Off.”)

While it’s tempting for us skeptics to gloat about the recent developments and the shifting sentiment, I find it sad and disgusting to see emotion and self-interest, rather than logic and a genuine concern for the human condition, driving this debate. I’ve noticed this happening quite a bit lately in everything ranging from economics to healthcare to science. Issues are becoming more and more politicized, debates are becoming more and more polarized, and truth and nuance are quickly disappearing.

Man-made global warming may or may not be true. As I see it, however, global warming is not the real crisis here. The real crisis is that the most significant issues humans are facing today are getting so political that we cannot even rely on the data, let alone a rational analysis of the data, to guide our decisions.

I have written several books containing fraud-prevention advice, so when someone I knew (not me, I swear) told me he was consulting a credit counseling agency in Florida for debt management, I asked whether he had researched the company. He essentially said, “No worries. I saw it on TV. The company’s website has the Better Business Bureau seal of approval on it, and the guy I talked to said the company had been BBB accredited for the past 16 years.” I decided to poke around a little myself.

The company’s called Consolidated Credit Counseling Services. Hearing it’s stationed in Florida was an instant warning sign. Florida seems to attract a fair share of shady business types (sorry Florida). I visited the company’s website and got a pop-up – another strike against the company.

I scrolled to the footer and clicked the Contact Us link. The Contact Us page included a toll-free phone number and an email address, but no mailing address – another bad sign. The experts tell you to always work with “brick and mortar” businesses – businesses that have a street address and are actually housed in a building, preferably locally.

The site claims:

Member BBB Since 1998
ISO 9001:2000 Registered
Trained and Certified Credit Counselors

Okay, that adds some credibility. Unfortunately, the guy from the company said it had BBB accreditation for 16 years. 2009 – 1998 = 11 years. Credit counselors who can’t do basic math… that’s interesting, but it still doesn’t prove the company’s shady.

Next, I tried to verify the company’s BBB accreditation, so I Googled “better business bureau florida.” At the top of the search results was a link for the BBB of Central Florida: Home. I clicked the link, clicked the CHECK OUT A BUSINESS OR CHARITY button, and searched for “consolidated credit counseling service.” That gave me one link to a company located at 5701 W Sunrise Blvd Ste 200, Ft Lauderdale, FL 33313. I clicked the link and got a page that included this blurb about the company’s BBB accreditation… or lack thereof.

Bingo! I’d discovered a scam operation, right? Well, not so fast. I called Consolidated Credit Counseling Services toll free at 1-800-320-9929 as instructed on the Contact Us page and got a recorded message. I pressed Option 4 to get the company’s mailing address. I wanted to verify that this company was the same one listed on the BBB of Central Florida site. Unfortunately, Option 4 led me back to the beginning of the message and did not provide me with a mailing address.

I tried Option 1 next to get general information. To my surprise, an actual person answered. I explained that I had visited the company’s website and saw the BBB logo at the bottom, but when I looked up the company on the BBB website, it showed the company as not having BBB accreditation. He sounded genuinely perplexed, saying “We’ve had BBB accreditation for the past 16 years! Are you sure?”

I said, “Yes, I’m on the Central Florida BBB website right now at www.orlando.bbb.org. I’m looking at the entry for Consolidated Credit Counseling Service, located at 5701 W Sunrise Blvd Ste 200, Ft Lauderdale, FL 33313, is that you?”

“Well, the suite number is wrong, but that’s us alright. I know we have accreditation. I’m going to call the BBB right now.”

We exchanged niceties and hung up.

My next call was to the Better Business Bureau of Central Florida. I went back to the BBB website, clicked Contact Us, and then dialed their number: 407.621.3300. After a long wait, I finally reached someone. I explained what was going on. She searched Consolidated Credit Counseling Services on her system and said she couldn’t even find the company. I explained that I was on the Florida BBB website looking at the listing for the company, and it states that the company does not have BBB accreditation.

She asked for the company’s address, and I provided it. She said companies in Fort Lauderdale were not in this particular branch of the BBB’s database. I would have to contact someone in the Southeast Florida BBB. I explained that I was looking at her branch’s website, and it listed Consolidated Credit, but showed the company as unaccredited.

She asked me the address of the BBB website I was on. I told her www.orlando.bbb.org. She replied, “Well, that’s the problem! We haven’t used that website for two years!”

“Well, then,” I asked, “Why is the site still up?”

“I don’t know. I’m not the webmaster!”

“Yes, but if consumers Google ‘florida bbb’ and land on this old website and search for this company, as I did, and this site lists the company and not accredited when it is, in fact, BBB accredited, doesn’t that do them a disservice?”

She agreed and said she would look into the matter. She also provided me with the Southeast Florida BBB website address: www.seflorida.bbb.org. After hanging up, I headed to the Southeast Florida BBB website, clicked the CHECK OUT A BUSINESS OR CHARITY button, and searched for “consolidated credit counseling service.” Again, the search turned up one link. I pointed to the link and up popped a box showing that Consolidated Credit Counseling Services, located at 5701 W Sunrise Blvd Ste 200, Ft Lauderdale, FL 33313 did, indeed, have BBB accreditation. Moreover, it had an A+ Rating!

The moral of this long and winding story is this: Be careful with what you find out about a company you’re researching on the Web. You could be encountering a case of mistaken identity or reading a rip-off report from one disgruntled customer when the company has provided outstanding service to 50,000 others. You might just dismiss a top-notch company due to bad information.

Another moral of the story is this: If you’re a business, you really should Google yourself and poke around the Web to see what people and organizations are saying about you and have in their databases.

Disclaimer and Other Notes: This article is no endorsement for Consolidated Credit Counseling Services. I have no personal experience and absolutely no relationship with the company, so I can’t say with any certainty whether it provides valuable credit counseling services.

I also know very little about the BBB, and this represents only one instance of a BBB website mistakenly providing inaccurate information about a company. I’m not sure how accurate the BBB’s information is overall, but I continue to use the BBB as one way to verify the legitimacy of a company or organization.

When researching the BBB, you would probably do better to start from the main BBB page at BBB.org, where you can type in a company’s Zip code to find the right BBB website for doing your search. If you just Google it, like I did, you might just land on an old site with old information… one that should have been taken offline years ago!

Let me know what you think. If you’ve had any experience with the BBB – as a consumer, business, or organization – or if you’ve had any dealings with Consolidated Credit Counseling Services of Fort Lauderdale, please post a comment to share your experiences and insights with others.

20 years ago, I’d call someone on the telephone and have a normal conversation – like we were talking in the same room, but we just couldn’t see each other. After 20 years of supposed advances in technology, fiber-optic cables, VoIP, wireless, satellite, and so forth, I call someone and feel like we’re talking on two tin cans tied together with a string.

Two issues in particular drive me absolutely bonkers:

Choppy Conversations

Over landline connections, people can talk over one another – interrupt each other while still hearing what the other person is saying. This is due to the fact that landline connections support full-duplex (2-way) communications. Assuming both parties practice some degree of etiquette, conversations proceed smoothly.

With wireless (cell-phone) communications and VoIP (Voice over IP or phone over Internet), conversations often feel choppy, words get lost, statements need to be repeated. To establish any sense of a normal conversation, one party must stop talking before the other can start. It’s like carrying on a conversation using walkie-talkies:

“Hi, this is Joe, over.”

“Joe, good to hear from you, over.”

“Are you doing anything this weekend? Over.”

“No, why? Over.”

Arggghhhh!

Cell phones and VoIP are supposed to be full-duplex, but they often seem more like half-duplex – you can listen or talk but you can’t do both at the same time.

Echoes

The other day, an old college buddy called me. Every time I said something, I could hear a faint echo of myself. It was like another phone was in the room picking up my voice in the background and playing it back through the receiver. I had to make sure I didn’t have speaker phone turned on by mistake. I ran around the house making sure the other phones were turned off. I tried swapping phones. I even tried hanging up and calling him back. Nothing worked!

Now I’m a big fan of technology. I couldn’t function without my computer. I love my DVR. YouTube is incredibly cool. But I believe that technology should improve quality, not degrade it. So, please, until the telecommunications industry works out all the bugs in wireless and VoIP, if you want to talk to me, have your landline call my landline. If you don’t have access to a landline, look for a pay phone. Remember those?

A few years ago, I had a run-in with Direct TV. They supplied me with a defective receiver and then tried to charge me for a new one because by the time they traced the ongoing problems to the receiver (after several troubleshooting sessions over the phone and TWO technicians visiting my home), my warranty had expired. After considerable negotiations, they graciously offered to send me a new receiver for free if I would pay the $25 shipping. I refused, didn’t pay my final bill (for the month I lived without TV service), and ended up having to deal with a tenacious collection agency until I was finally able to convice the collectors to back off. Direct TV now sends me regular offers to win me back as a customer, all of which end up in the trash.

I have been using DISH Network for satellite TV service and Wildblue for broadband Internet service ever since. (DISH has some sort of relationship with Wildblue – I have one account through DISH Network that covers both my satellite TV and Internet.)

The other day, I lost my Internet connection, so I called DISH/Wildblue to have the problem resolved. The company sent a couple technicians to troubleshoot and repair the connection, which they did. Apparently, a power surge had damaged a component of the dish.

While they were at my house, I asked the technicians whether they would look at my TV service or if I would have to make a separate call for that. They said, “Sure, what’s happening with your TV?” I explained the problem and, after a bit of troubleshooting, they traced the problem back to the receiver. One of the guys ran out to the truck and grabbed a new receiver. They installed it, got everything up and running, and thanked me. Now THAT’S customer service!

Leave it to the drug dealers to master social media marketing. I just finished reading an interesting article on PCWorld.com by Ian Paul entitled “Medical Marijuana Dispensary Thrives on Twitter,” revealing that Los Angeles based Arts Collective, a medical marijuana dispensary, has mastered social media and social networking tools including Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace to spread the word about its products and service.

It strikes me as funny that so many mainstream businesses in the United States have so much trouble adjusting their advertising and marketing to online venues while certain mom and pop operations, including at least one medical marijuana dispensary, seem to do it so naturally… achieving huge success almost overnight.

My wife has a subscription to Vanity Fair magazine, which I happen to like to read, too. Funny thing is, we keep getting these notices from National Publication Billing Services with offers to up our subscription, even though our subscription isn’t scheduled to expire until December of 2011! That’s just before the world is going to end in 2012, so why would anyone want to up their subscription beyond that?! Here’s what the notice looks like:

Admittedly, we fell for this scam several times in the past. That’s why we now have a subscription that doesn’t expire until 2011. About 10 years ago, before we were aware of what was going on, we automatically assumed that this notice meant our subscription was soon due to expire, so we dutifully wrote a check and sent it in.

One day (yes, I’m a little slow on the uptake), I realized that I had upped our subscription about five times in less than a year. I called the magazine, and they informed me that our subscription wouldn’t expire for another decade. They said all I had to do was look on the mailing label when I received the next copy of the magazine to find the expiration date for our subscription. Well, duh me.

The next issue we received, I checked the mailing label, and sure enough, it included the subscription’s expiration date.

If you’ve been suckered by this same pitch, I’d like to hear about it. If you haven’t fallen for this slick trick but you’re receiving these notices, contact the magazine and ask when you’re subscription is due to run out, check the mailing label on your magazine, or look up the expiration date on the magazine’s website.

I’m a big fan of the FCC’s Do Not Call Registry. Adding my phone number to the registry has significantly reduced the number of unsolicited calls to my residence. However, I’m still receiving regular calls from Florida – the number that shows up on caller ID is 407-000-4321. The company claims it can help lower my credit card interest rate, if I ACT NOW!

Since I always pay off my credit card balance in full whenever I receive my monthly statement, the company can’t possibly save me any money, but that’s beside the point – my number is on the Do Not Call Registry, so they shouldn’t be calling me.

After receiving about a dozen calls from this number, I finally pressed 9 to speak with a representative. When he asked what he could do to help me, I told him to remove my number from their list. He said he couldn’t. I proceeded to inform him that his “… company was in violation of the FCC’s…” Click! Yep, the bastard hung up on me.

To return the favor, I filed a complaint with the FCC. It’s pretty easy, and you can do it all online by clicking File a Complaint and following the onscreen instructions. If you’ve been receiving unsolicited phone calls from 407-000-4321 even though your phone number is on the FCC’s Do Not Call Registry, I encourage you to head to the FCC website and file a formal complaint. If enough of us complain, maybe the phone calls will stop.

I’ve always had a fascination with snakes, so when I saw this one on the motor of my boat, I was delighted. After spotting this beauty and pointing it out to my wife, she pointed to another one about twice the size resting on the boatlift closer to the water.

Curious to know what kind of snake we were sharing our swimming hole with, I did a little research and was surprised to discover just how similar these snakes look compared to the Western cottonmouth – the dreaded water moccasin. With a little more research, I discovered that cottonmouths are very rare in Indiana and are pretty much restricted to far Southern Indiana. The snakes on our lake, in Central Indiana, are more likely to be Northern or Midland water snakes – nonpoisonous.

Unfortunately, it’s pretty common for people to mistake these water snakes for cottonmouths and kill them out of ignorance and fear. Too bad. These are really cool snakes.

After I snapped the pictures, a smaller snake (same species) crawled up on the motor and chased the other two back into the water.

I spent an hour yesterday in a Go To Meeting Webinar. If you’re not familiar with the whole concept of a Webinar, it’s the equivalent of an online board meeting. Everyone invited to the meeting logs into a central website, and then the presenters lead the meeting via a slideshow presentation that appears on every one’s screens.

I’ve attended about three Webinars in my entire life, so I don’t really know the standard operating procedure, but in every one I’ve attended, the video appears onscreen, but you have to use your phone to dial in and get the audio. It’s more like drive-in theatre than a truly interactive experience.

To make it even more like a drive-in, attendees are usually instructed to mute their phones (the microphone, not the receiver), so any background noise (like my dog barking in the background) doesn’t interrupt the presentation. (If you have questions, you can type them in, and the presenter will presumably answer them at a convenient time.)

At any rate, about ten minutes into the presentation, some joker logs in and calls in. This is obviously his first Go To Meeting, because you can hear him rustling around in the background. He didn’t get the memo about muting his phone. After some indiscernible mumbling, he blurts out, “Well this is really stupid. I can watch the video on screen, but I have to dial in to get the audio? What a bunch of idiots!”

Good thing I had my phone muted, because I couldn’t hold back the laughter. What a goon!

The presenter handled it well and explained that all this was new to her. She said that if anyone could recommend a better system for handling online meetings, she was open to suggestions, and then she went on with the meeting.

The clueless caller hung up, found the mute button on his phone, or just decided to clam up. I’m not sure. I was just glad it wasn’t me.

A funny thing happens when you stop paying workers a decent wage – they can’t buy stuff. By outsourcing jobs to foreign countries, corporate America has managed to wipe out its consumer base. We are now witnessing the fallout. Sure, we’ve been able to purchase products for less money as a result, but when you don’t have a job, you can’t afford to pay less for products, because you can’t afford to pay anything.

I remember all the talk of how the global economy was going to raise the standard of living for everyone around the world. Theoretically, it probably should have. However, when you outsource jobs to foreign countries where people are living on a few dollars a day, and you pay those workers barely enough to feed, clothe, and house their families, they don’t exactly have a boatload of disposable income to dole out for plasma TVs and fancy cars, strange as that may seem. In short, they couldn’t afford the stuff they were producing, and now we can’t afford that stuff either.

Instead of making us all a little more equally affluent, globalization has only succeeded in making us all more equally impoverished. And I highly doubt that patching the hole in the housing bubble is going to lift us out of this nose dive. It may give the economy a temporary lift, but without decent paying jobs, even a more affordable house payment will be unaffordable.