Trust Me

"Bob said that in the old days, a handshake was good enough to seal a deal," said a relative over dinner, talking about Bob's experience growing up in textile country, back when Americans still made clothes in North Carolina. "They didn't need any lawyers."

I remembered old home ec books, with instructions for turning old dresses into jumpers, and making dad's old shirts into pinafores for little girls.

"Clothes were expensive in those days," I said. "Things were cozy. Manufacturers all knew one another. They could agree on a handshake."

"It's only when outsiders got into the industry that not everybody knew one another. Then they needed contracts to spell out their expectations. Those outsiders shook things up, and they drove prices down."

The relative did not appreciate my opinion, but her husband, an attorney, did.

I've been thinking about trust lately. As I said, I have a great idea. To submit a patent application, I need an engineer to think it through. But how do you find the right engineer, somebody you can trust not to steal your idea? You don't look them up in the Yellow Pages. You ask around. And when you find what you hope is the right person, you draw up a paper agreement, just in case.

Which is Poorly Made in China, a new book by Paul Midler, fascinated me. Midler lives in southern China. He negotiates and performs quality control on behalf of US importers of Chinese manufactured goods.

He describes how, after a couple of shipments, Chinese producers begin a process Midler calls "quality fade," subtly and gradually substituting less expensive materials or processes. Or when the importer gets a big order from an American customer, the producer announces a price hike. Or increases production runs and exports to another country.

Is it that the Chinese producers have no respect for the paper contracts they sign? Or is it that they view Americans as capitalist running dogs who deserve to be swindled?

Minutes after I closed Poorly Made in China, I picked up the Star Ledger and read Kelly Heyboer's article about Centenary College's closing its Chinese and Taiwanese satellite campuses. Cheating there was so widespread that administrators declared that they could not confer the MBAs the students had enrolled for.

Until it's violated, we don't realize how much we rely on trust, nor how expensive it would be to have to police every transaction.

Midler says that the Chinese are only able to copy Western products, but Heyboer describes wristwatches that allow people taking competitive entrance exams to share answers. I doubt Americans are making or using those. Not yet.

How do you guard against Dick Tracy watches in exams? Make everybody test naked?

Anyway, you can be sure I won't outsource my patent application to China. Keep your fingers crossed for me, ok?

Google Wouldn't Do This for Me

Neither would the New York Times

In fact, I'm pretty sure the Star-Ledger doesn't want me to tell you this, but-

My husband brought me a sausage recipe from the newspaper. "Gee," he said, "this looks tasty." Not only that, it would use up some of that cabbage in the refrigerator.

I wrote down the missing ingredients on the shopping list and clipped the recipe. Several days later, when I had all the ingredients, I looked for the recipe but could not find it anywhere.

"No problem!" I said. "I'll find it on their website." I'm a pretty good Googler, but I never did find it. I had to improvise, throwing ingredients in the pan and crossing my fingers. Naturally, I wrote a peevish email to the Star-Ledger, saying that I expected their website to mirror and archive their print content.

I had a very kind email back. Someone named Kim offered to US mail me the only sausage recipes that the Star Ledger had printed within the last month. I felt bad putting her to that trouble; all I had wanted was to express my annoyance. She insisted that she had already pulled the section and the envelope was right in front of her.

The envelope arrived today. "Kim" turned out to be Kimberly Jackson, the Lifestyle editor. And to my delight, it was the right recipe. I'm looking forward to trying it, right after I go shopping again.

Thanks, Ms. Jackson. Thanks, Star Ledger. I'm glad I'm a print subscriber.

Hoodwinked

Reality can be ugly enough. The story in the Star Ledger about the man who shot his girlfriend and boiled her head made me want to read something light and fluffy.

So I went to the library looking for a diversion and found some chick lit, You Had Me at Goodbye, by Tracey Bateman.

The problem with browsing at the library is that the call numbers cover up the colophons. Had I been able to see the full spine I would have known that this was Christian literature disguised as ordinary chick lit.

I wanted to read about how a heroine improbably solves her problems with skinny lattes and stilettos.

I was hoodwinked.

News Wh... er, Hound

I have a new job, in Jersey City. I take the train to it. This is the perfect opportunity to read the morning paper, and when I am done with the paper I put it in the recycling bin at Hoboken Station. So much less paper to bundle up on recycling day--great!

Unfortunately, it only takes me about half the train ride to read the Star-Ledger. So now I am a news who... er, hound.

When I board the train, I scan the seats for commuters with large stacks of riffled newspapers beside them. I'm picky--I want the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, not the Star-Ledger or the Daily News. "Oh, is this your paper?" I ask my seatmate.

"Sure, you can read it."

The Star-Ledger costs about 1/4 the price of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, so I don't expect as much. I know that the Ledger is having financial problems. They recently cut out Diesel Sweeties (don't miss it) and Miss Manners (do). What I don't get is why their national and international coverage is so much less readable than the Times's or the Journal's. I read for days about Russia's incursion into Ossetia before I thought I understood what was going on. (And for the record, I majored in economics and political science.)

Where the Star-Ledger excels is in covering New Jersey. Makes sense. Maybe the editors think that anyone really interested in life outside New Jersey will also read the bigger papers? But yesterday two of the big front page articles were about parks in western New Jersey, and the death of a Perth Amboy police officer. I had to go to page four to learn that President Bush and Nouri Al-Maliki were discussing a pullout of US troops from Iraq by 2011.

Now maybe the insignificant position of the article and the analysis were the editors' way of pointing out that whatever President Bush negotiates, our new president will likely renegotiate it in 2009. That's fine. But then shouldn't the editors say so on the op-ed page?

I'll keep looking for answers. Sometimes you may find me bereft of reading material, with the other gold-diggers at the recycling bin outside track 17.