INTRODUCTION
DO YOU KNOW HOW TO survive a plane crash? How to spot bedbugs? What if someone breaks into your home? What if a contractor is trying to rip you off?
Most of us don’t know any of this stuff. And most of us don’t even consider it. It’s human nature. Our brain makes a simple assumption: Because nothing disastrous happened yesterday, nothing disastrous will happen tomorrow.
Yet there’s one tiny problem with this logic. Disasters do happen. They happen to good people. For the past several years, I’ve crisscrossed the country to research the surprising ways our luck can turn on a dime, how to respond in every kind of emergency, how to sniff out hidden dangers, and how to save you cash.
That’s my mission with Rossen Reports. As the national investigative correspondent for NBC’s Today show, I’ve spent years putting myself into the shoes of … well, you. I try to solve your problems. I consult with the nation’s top experts on earthquakes, webcam predators, fake rubies, and everything from train safety to rigged carnival games. My goal is to give you tips, strategies, and takeaways that are actually useful—not some theoretical mumbo jumbo.
I also believe in learning by doing. And I believe in putting my money where my mouth is. So, to find out how to survive an avalanche, I actually buried myself alive. (Spoiler alert: I got out.) I was stranded at sea to show you how to survive, I trapped myself in a car and drove through a flood (my wife was so thrilled), and I walked across hot coals barefoot. This book will take you inside my dramatic experiments and the stuff I couldn’t show you on TV. I’m also getting super personal here. Revealing things about my own life I’ve never shared before. Some of it is emotional. A lot of it is embarrassing. But since you bought this book, you are now my friend. And friends get full access.
I began working on this book, in a sense, when I was eleven years old. My mom took me to a mall on Long Island and we saw a man sitting behind a desk doing a live radio show. He was surrounded by speakers. He was balding, overweight, and he spoke into a microphone. A crowd of maybe ten people circled around him, mesmerized. I turned to my mom. “I want to be him someday. I want to do that.”
And, in fact, I did turn into that guy. (At the very least, I certainly lost some hair and gained some weight.) I weaseled my way into a college radio station at the age of thirteen, doing whatever odd jobs they would give me, fascinated by the DJ flipping switches and touching buttons. I asked him question after question while he played a college mix of reggae and jazz and pop and classical. What’s that button do? How do you change the sound mix?
In high school, I somehow talked my way into an internship at ABC Radio. (Not unrelated: Girls weren’t exactly banging down my door. I like to think it was my orange neon shorts, not my personality.) But it finally paid off. It all led to a real reporting job at the ABC affiliate in Syracuse while I was still a full-time college student. After graduation I moved to Detroit, then to New York, and then, ultimately, to NBC News. From the very beginning, I was fascinated by two core questions: How can I help people? And How do I cut through the crap?
That’s what this book is all about. Real stuff. Real people. Sometimes the advice can save your life, sometimes it can save you cash, and sometimes it can save you some calories. There is one bit of advice, however, that you will never hear: Don’t panic.
I HATE that phrase. Put it into the junk folder. Not only is the advice clichéd, it’s just stupid. Because in a life-threatening situation, you will panic. It’s unavoidable. I know this because I constantly throw myself into these harrowing scenarios and, every time, I panic. The human body has a fight-or-flight mechanism that is designed to unleash at times of anxiety. Panic is in our bones. It’s better to just know that you will panic, accept it, and factor it into your plan.
Now, you might have a very reasonable question: Okay, so if I can’t avoid panicking, then what can I do?
You can learn some tricks, and dramatically boost your odds of survival, from natural disasters to crooked contractors. Let’s say, for example, a “mold inspector” visits your house and slaps you with a $700 bill. Should you pay? Is he legit? This book gives you some simple solutions. There are a few buzzwords you can say, a few things you can do, to send a message that’s crystal clear—Mess with the next guy, not me.
Here’s the honest truth: When I’m not on TV, I’m just the guy whose toilet broke, and needs to find a plumber to fix it. Or the guy whose car got a flat tire. Or the guy who’s worried about the safety of his kids. Or the guy who is helping his mother fight cancer, hugging and hoping and praying. I’m just a guy. That’s where all these stories come from—my random questions about how to spot hidden dangers, how to stay safe, and how to sniff out a scam.
And I’ve learned a few things. After years of near-death experiences, tests in laboratories, interviews with experts, and more experiments than I can possibly count, I want to share what I’ve learned with you.
It just might save your life.
1
PROTECTING YOUR HOME
WE THINK OF OUR HOMES as safe. A place to unwind, relax, and recharge. Yet if we’re not careful …
• How to Survive a Home Invasion
• How to Spot Hidden Mold
• Why Your New House May Catch Fire
• You Probably Don’t Have a Fire Escape Plan
• Help! I’m Locked Out!
• When the Bottom Falls Out … Literally
• Surviving Mother Nature
• Secret Spies Inside Your Bedroom
How to Survive a Home Invasion
1986. Midnight. I was ten years old, sound asleep in my bedroom. My brother was asleep in his room, and my parents asleep in theirs.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
The sound woke me up.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
The sound came from downstairs. It didn’t sound like my father or a friend or a neighbor who came to borrow a cup of sugar. The sound was terrifying. Alien.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
I pulled the covers close to me. I was paralyzed—my family had never discussed a “safety plan” in case of a home invasion, and I didn’t know what to do. I stayed frozen in my bedroom.
My father, however, did not stay frozen.
I heard my parents’ bedroom door swing open, and my father raced from his room and flicked on the lights. He suddenly transformed into an action-movie hero.
“We’re home and I have a bat!” my father screamed, charging downstairs. He jumped seven stairs at a time, headlong into the face of danger. “I have a bat!” he yelled again.
My dad’s heroics worked. He scared the would-be robber away and, as we crept downstairs into the kitchen, I saw something terrifying. The bang, bang, bang had come from a thief kicking the dead bolt on our back door. The lock was busted. The door frame was cracked. One more kick and he would have been inside, and then … who knows what. It had been raining that night, and when I looked outside I could see footprints in the lawn. I can still see those footprints. And I still have a lingering fear of home invasions; even when I travel, I avoid first-floor hotel rooms.
The statistics provide little comfort, as home invasions are more common than you might think—they happen nearly 50,000 times a year, or 135 every day. No one is immune. In recent years, Sandra Bullock, Ray Allen, and even the Kennedy family had their homes violated.
If the rich and famous are vulnerable—even with their fancy security systems—all of us are. Anyone can find themselves in the predicament like Susan Dawson from Fountain Hills, Arizona, who was the victim of a home invasion. Her story is chilling. She saw an intruder in her home, and screamed, “Oh my gosh, who are you?!” and then he ran across the room and punched her in the nose. Then he tied her up.
“I lay there, and he kept going through the bedroom, looking for stuff,” Susan told me. While tied up she kept asking herself, How is he going to kill me?
Susan lived to tell the tale. And she’s proof that there are, thankfully, a few things you can do to maximize your chances of making it out alive. For guidance, I spoke to Wallace Zeins, a former NYPD detective, and a hostage negotiator with twenty-two years of experience. (Zeins has a tough, intense stare—this is not a guy you want to play in a poker tournament.)
“So if I hear a noise in my home, what do I do?” I ask him.
“Real simple. A lot of people don’t have alarms, they’re very expensive. So … instead of leaving your car keys downstairs, leave them on your night table.”
His advice is simple, easy, and smart. If you hear a noise downstairs, just click the car alarm, and that should frighten the intruder, meaning you won’t have to race downstairs like my father. Intruders hate the attention. Noise is the enemy.
There’s another thing you can do, and it costs less than a dollar. For about ninety-nine cents, you can buy a tiny alarm called a “window alert.” You just stick it on a window or a door, and if an intruder opens it, the sensors get separated and it emits a loud, piercing alarm.
And in that vein, there are plenty of new, affordable gadgets that work with your smartphone where you get an alert right away when someone is in your home. With the Canary home security system, for example, a live video feed shows you their every move, and you can even call police with the touch of a button. Best part? The gadgets record everything.
So what happens if, worst case, you are captured like Susan Dawson? There’s one key course of action: cooperation. If they ask where the money is, you tell them. If they ask where the jewelry is, you tell them. You can always get more cash or sapphires; you can never get a new heartbeat. “Treat them like royalty,” advises Zeins. This is exactly what Susan Dawson did, and this is why she’s still alive.
It pays to play it safe and take these precautions. It’s also worth remembering that these guidelines—like all the guidelines in this book—are just that, guidelines, and not hard and fast rules. In any life-and-death situation, you need to keep your head on a swivel and be prepared to improvise. My dad did not technically play things by the book, but he may have saved our lives. Then again, in 1986, we didn’t have remote-controlled car alarms or ninety-nine-cent window alerts. Our “home alarm” was a baseball bat and a whopping dose of courage. (Thanks again, Dad.) But now we do have those technologies—let’s use them.
How to Spot Hidden Mold
My kids are young, so sippy cups are my life. I have what seems like every color, every shape, every style. I clean them after every use. But then I saw something that rocked my sippy little world.
A woman snapped a photo of her son’s sippy cup and it went viral. From the outside the cup looked normal. Clean. Shiny. When you peel open the lid, however, you can see dark clumps of mold that look like a mix of vomit, feces, and rotten cheese. Lovely. The photos freaked out the parenting community, including me.
So that got me thinking … how much mold is lurking in my home?
I like to think my family is tidy. We regularly scrub our counters, sweep, mop, vacuum, even dust. (Okay, maybe “regular dusting” is a stretch. But we do own a feather-duster. I think.) To put my own home to the test, I invite a certified mold inspector, Matt Waletzke, to expose my moldy laundry.
Waletzke ping-pongs through my apartment, back and forth, from room to room, opening cabinet doors and peering underneath furniture. (Why did I agree to this?) He points a handheld contraption that looks straight out of Star Trek, with a tiny monitor that analyzes what’s lurking under my sink.
I feel good about the kitchen. It’s clean … and then he opens the cabinet door under the sink.
“You find anything?” I ask.
“I did. Under here, where you keep all of your cleaning products.” He points to some dark stains underneath the bottles of (ironically) disinfectant. “There’s a plumbing leak here, which is causing some moisture and some mold growth.” If left unchecked, it could become a bigger problem.
Then he stands up and points to my sink, which, if I do say so myself, looks spotless. I take pride in a clean kitchen and a clean sink. He holds up a little metal tray that holds our sponge. “Down in this little tray here, there’s a lot of black growth.…”
Are you kidding me? Then it dawns on me … this is the very tray that holds the sponge. The sponge is what I use to clean the dishes. The dishes are used to eat food. The food goes in my body.
“And then one thing a lot of people don’t know about is underneath the refrigerator,” the inspector says. “Under here there’s a drip pan.”
A refrigerator has a “drip pan”? No one told me about drip pans. They don’t teach you that in Grown-Up 101. Waletzke bends to his knees, reaches under the fridge, and pulls out a large tray. The tray oozes with dark liquids and slime and murky sauces. I avert my eyes, horrified.
“That is hideous!” I cry out.
“Yeah,” he agrees, not even bothering to sugarcoat it. “This is all mold and bacterial growth that’s built up over time.”
“I never even knew this was here.” I’m still shell-shocked.
“Most people don’t.” He adds that you can avoid this problem by cleaning the drip pan once or twice a month. “That’s enough to take care of it.”
Again I force myself to look at the brown sewage-looking water inside the pan. “This is the kind of stuff that can make you sick, if it’s left untreated?”
“It could.”
He heads to the washing machine, and when he opens the door I breathe a sigh of relief. Phew. It’s clean. Then he peels back the rubber liner from the door … and reveals dark smudges and streaks of mold. So. Damn. Gross. “How dangerous is this?”
“That could be dangerous if it gets airborne and you’re breathing it.”
Of course I didn’t know any of that … so I was putting my kids at risk without even realizing it.
BIG TIP HERE: Front-loading washers are often teeming with bacteria. Pull back the rubber lining around the door and wipe it down with a paper towel between washes. To help prevent mold entirely, keep the door cracked open so air can get in when you’re not using it. Then the moisture won’t build and the mold can’t grow.
And now for the coup de grace: my bathroom. He steps into my shower, pokes around the shampoo and conditioner bottles, and then motions for me to step inside the shower. We’re now both standing inside my small shower. Just two grown men in the shower, face-to-face, having a conversation about mold.
“This is not weird at all,” I say, and he laughs a little.
Waletzke holds up the shampoo bottles. “You and your wife have a lot of products in here, and sometimes, when you don’t use them all the time, you don’t notice the buildup.”
I look closer. At the bottom of the bottle is a thick, black layer of grime. Ew. “Ugh, that’s disgusting,” I say, by way of scientific analysis.
He points to more bottles, more hair products, and more dark stains. My entire shower is a cesspool.
Waletzke points to another bottle, this one with a tag at the bottom. “You can see the mold growth on the tag. Mold loves paper like that.”
“So I should rip the stickers off, at the very least?”
“At the very least,” he agrees, “especially in the shower.”
He finds more cheery news in the bathtub. Every night, before my kids go to bed, I give them a bath. I use a blue plastic pail to scoop water on their heads. Waletzke inspects this blue pail … and finds an unholy amount of dark slime.
“And this is the pail that I use … every night to pour over my kids heads when I wash their hair,” I say, staring at the slime. “That’s scary.”
“It is,” he says grimly.
“Hey, thanks so much for coming by, by the way.”
“Anytime.” We shake hands.
“Never come over again,” I say, laughing, and he laughs, too, but I wasn’t really joking.
KEY TAKEAWAY: Scrub the places you don’t think need scrubbing. Clean your drip pan. And if you see something that looks like mold, it might be worth it to call a professional mold inspector.
(But can you actually trust these mold inspectors? Glad you asked—before you call one, be sure you read pages 84–88.)
Why Your New House May Catch Fire
Every year, thousands of people are killed in house fires. Usually there’s very little time to escape—just a few minutes, tops. And it seems like the problem is getting worse. I’m no fire marshal, but it sure feels like homes are burning faster than they used to when I was a kid. Are today’s homes actually more flammable than the ones from the old days?
I decide to channel my inner pyromaniac to create a little experiment. In a fire lab in Chicago, a team constructs two mini “homes” and builds them side by side. The first room is a throwback to the seventies or eighties, the way homes used to be built, and is decorated with older furniture. The coffee table is made from real wood. The couch is made from natural fabrics.
The second room? It looks a lot like, well, the way your own home probably looks now. It has modern furniture and synthetic fibers—synthetic curtains, a synthetic couch, even synthetic fibers in the coffee table.
It’s time for the fire. I put on a hard hat and safety goggles—(not the sexiest look, but it keeps us safe)—and watch them light that eighties house. I stand inside the old room with John Drengenberg, a consumer safety director at Underwriters Laboratories. The pros start a fire on the old couch, and a pillow begins to gently burn. I brace myself for a dramatic flame and an explosion, but instead … just a few licks of fire. I wait for a minute—still just a small flicker. Two minutes—it has barely spread. Three, four, five minutes … no fiery inferno, no scorching flames.
Ten minutes: the fire is still contained to the couch.
Fifteen minutes: Yep, still on the couch.
Twenty-five minutes: The fire still hasn’t left the couch. Theoretically, I had time to calmly sit down on the floor and watch an entire episode of Seinfeld. (Note to reader: Do NOT watch an entire episode of Seinfeld while your home is burning around you.) The fire still hasn’t spread to the coffee table, it hasn’t reached the plant, and the puffs of black smoke, while not exactly pleasant, are not yet overpowering.
Finally the rest of the room gets engulfed by the flames, and I scamper out the door to safety. It took thirty minutes for that eighties house to burn. Of course it’s still a very dangerous situation, but it allows plenty of time for you and your family to get to safety.
How about the modern room?
The pros start the fire in the same place—on the synthetic couch.
Whoooooosh! Instantly the flames dance higher and higher, quickly spreading across the couch. “The backing of your carpet is synthetic, your drapes are synthetic, the couch, the pillows are synthetic,” says Drengenberg, the safety director. “They burn hotter and faster than natural materials do.”
Do they ever. Seconds later the entire couch is consumed by flames. It jumps to the lamp and the end table. And now I’m having a hard time breathing—the black smoke has slithered into my throat, and even though this is a highly controlled lab, I feel a quick shard of fear. Smoke does that to you.
Two minutes and twenty seconds: the chair is on fire.
Two minutes and forty seconds: the coffee table is on fire.
Like an idiot I’m still standing in the room, and now the roof is on fire.
“Should we leave?!” I ask Drengenberg, hoping that my voice doesn’t sound completely panicked.
“Yeah, let’s get out of here,” he says, nodding.
We both sprint through the doorway … and the modern room is now a heap of ashes.
So for those of you scoring at home: It took less than three minutes for the modern room to burn, and thirty minutes for that old room. It turns out this isn’t an aberration. Research shows that in the 1980s, you had an average of seventeen minutes to escape a burning home. Today? Only three to four minutes. One big reason is synthetic fiber, explains Drengenberg. “It’s the way homes are furnished today. There’s no getting away from that.”
This feels so profoundly unfair. As civilization marches forward and technology improves, we like to imagine that things get better with time. Computers are faster. Cars are safer. Yet, when it comes to our homes and fire safety, things have actually taken a step backward.
So why build furniture with flammable synthetics? Yep, it’s cheaper. Cheaper for the manufacturer and, therefore, cheaper for us to buy. There’s not as much real wood. It’s stuff that looks like wood. So we’re all part of the problem. We demand more affordable furniture, and the industry has given us what we want. (But is asking for affordable, nonflammable furniture really too much to ask?)
The one silver lining is that, according to the National Association of Home Builders, the new building codes actually make the houses safer overall, when you consider other risk factors such as the chance of collapse. And the American Home Furnishings Alliance, aware of the problem, supports a federal flammability standard for upholstered furniture … but only if the product changes are safe, effective, and affordable.
I wish I could tell you to avoid synthetic furniture and bedding altogether, but that’s nearly impossible, as it’s everywhere. So there are two key takeaways:
1) If a fire strikes, don’t dawdle. “When your smoke alarm goes off you don’t have time to look around to get your wedding pictures,” advises Drengenberg. Get out quick.
2) Stick to your fire escape plan.
You have a fire escape plan, right? That leads us to …
You Probably Don’t Have a Fire Escape Plan
Every few months, the fire marshal comes to my office at 30 Rock to give the obligatory fire-safety speech. Some real talk: I’ve been the guy falling asleep during this speech. Most of us have. I used to zone out and think about my next meeting, or my kid’s upcoming birthday, or fantasize about that second cup of coffee.
It’s human nature. Most of us don’t really take “fire safety” seriously until it’s far too late. The numbers back this up: a whopping 82 percent of families have never practiced a fire-safety drill, and 52 percent have never even discussed fire safety with their kids. Most of us think, “I know my house, I could get out in an emergency.” After all, I get up to go to the bathroom in the pitch-black. I can do it with my eyes closed. So, it seems simple, right? Step 1. Look for the flames. Step 2. Run in the opposite direction.
But it’s not that simple.
To demonstrate just how easy it is to get disoriented without a good plan, we put a Connecticut family through the ultimate fire drill, even pumping in smoke machines and fake flames. They seemed confident.
“Do you guys have a fire plan as a family?” I ask them.
“We do not,” says the mom.
“If there’s a fire, do you think you can get out?”
“I think we could, yeah,” says the dad.
“No big deal?” I ask.
“Eh, no, I guess it’s easy to get out,” says the son.
We send the family upstairs to bed, then wait for them to settle in. Once the kids drift off to sleep, and in the pitch-black of night, we unleash the smoke. We’re watching a live feed on infrared cameras.
“Hit the smoke alarm!” I tell the team. So they push the smoke alarm. BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!
Instantly the mom and dad stand up and head for the hallway.
Mistake #1. “In a real fire, there are superheated gases up high [in the air],” says Ryan O’Donnell, CEO of BullEx, a fire-safety company. “A couple of breaths there, they’d be all done.”
I check in on the kids—they scramble from their beds and head for the bedroom door … where they open it right up.
Mistake #2. “There could have been a large body of fire right on the other side of that door,” explains O’Donnell. “That’s a critical mistake. They should have taken the time to feel the door.”
Smoke fills the house. Of course the flames aren’t real—the family knows they’re just on a video screen—but they are still disoriented and blinded. “Where are you?!” the mom calls out to the kids. They can barely see the stairs, stumbling and fumbling.
Eventually—too slowly—they make their way down to the front door … a way out. But then the mom makes one last mistake. A big one.
“I’m gonna get the dog,” the mom says. She goes back inside the house.
“You never want to pass an exit,” says O’Donnell. “Especially to go deeper into the fire. This is not survivable.” (No matter how much you love your dog. Sorry, Scraps.)
This experiment scared me straight, and since then I’ve had multiple talks with my own kids about our fire escape plan. We practice it. The experts say it’s critical to practice your plan while you’re awake and alert, training our brains for when a real emergency strikes.
Think of it like sports: Whether it’s baseball or soccer or tennis, athletes practice the same drill again and again until it becomes second nature, creating muscle memory, and preparing their bodies for decisive action when the game is actually on the line. If athletes do this for something as silly as tossing leather balls in a basket, why not take the same approach for saving the lives of your family?
I’ve now embraced this mind-set. I work in a New York City skyscraper, so I speak with my team all the time—What would you do if the east side of the building is on fire? The west side? Which stairs do you use? At home my family practiced the fire drill, and my kids were astonished to find they don’t need to leave through the front door. There are other exits—ones they don’t normally use. Seems obvious to us adults, but to kids, the front door is how they come in every day. What if we hadn’t shown them, and they just assumed it’s the front door or bust? Now they know that if there’s a fire, they have a second avenue for escape.
I’m also now more careful about checking the smoke detectors once a month, replacing the batteries twice a year, and keeping a fire extinguisher by the kitchen.
To help you create a fire escape plan, the American Red Cross has a handy worksheet on its website. The statistics are grim: In 2015 alone, there were nearly 488,000 structure fires, resulting in 2,800 deaths. According to the American Red Cross, every two and a half hours someone is killed in a home fire. So why toss the dice?
Help! I’m Locked Out!
It’s happened to you. It’s happened to me. And it’s frustrating. You lock your keys inside the house—just a boneheaded mistake—and now you’re standing outside, desperate, maybe freezing cold, and you’re forced to call an emergency locksmith.
But I had a hunch: Don’t the locksmiths know that we’re desperate? Are they jacking up their fees to exploit our vulnerability? According to the Better Business Bureau, some “rogue locksmiths” are leaving many consumers out in the cold. So I hatched a little experiment. In 2011, my team rented a suburban house as our “laboratory,” and we hired a licensed locksmith, Jerry Giamanco, to install some simple locks on a door. These are basic locks, according to our expert, and they should only take a few seconds to crack. We watch him pick the lock in just seconds. Easy. Giamanco says the job should cost around one hundred bucks.
But what would other locksmiths do?
Ada, my trusty NBC producer, purposely locks herself outside. With the rest of our production team, I stay out of sight in a secret control room.
“I’m locked out of the house,” Ada tells a locksmith over the phone, “and I need someone to help me get back in!”
She calls a second locksmith. Then a third. She eventually calls eight locksmiths to see how they would respond. All eight of these locksmiths are the kind you see in ads around town, usually claiming “low prices” and 24-hour service.
Soon the first one arrives.
“I’m so glad you finally got here!” says Ada, really showing her acting chops.
The first one picks the lock and only charges $97. Nice! This is what our expert said it should cost—not everyone’s a crook.
Then the second one arrives.
“Hi!” says Ada, feigning a note of desperation. “I thought you’d never get here.”
This particular locksmith, like many, touts a “$15 service fee.” But when he gets to the door …
“It’s a hundred dollars and the fifteen-dollar service fee,” the locksmith says. Instead of picking the lock—what our expert said every legit locksmith should do—he tries to pry the door open with a board. But that doesn’t work. So this “expert” pulls out a pair of pliers and rips off the doorknob.
Now, in fairness to the locksmith, that’s exactly what I would do if I needed to break in—I would rip off the doorknob. But then again, I am not a licensed locksmith. The math is starting to add up: We’re on the hook for the $15 service fee, the $100 base fee, plus a brand-new lock and doorknob. Total price: $223.
And here’s the real crazy thing: In most states, locksmiths don’t have to go through background checks or be licensed. (Yep, this means that with just a little bit of Internet advertising and a whole lot of BS, you, too, can call yourself a professional locksmith.)
Once again, Giamanco installs a fresh lock and once again, Ada calls a locksmith. And once again, a contractor shows up at the door. This one immediately brings out a drill. He doesn’t even try to pick the lock! He barely glances at it. And since he destroyed the old lock with his drill, oh, hey, whattya know! He just happens to have a new one that he can sell Ada for $265. I pop out from my hiding place and confront the guy.
“You didn’t even try to pick the lock!” I tell him.
“Because I’m experienced,” he says. “That’s what I do.”
Incredulous, I let him continue.
“You don’t pick locks,” the man says. “In the movies they pick locks. You can’t pick a lock.”
The movies, huh? Then how was our expert able to pick the lock in seconds?
He leaves, we reset the experiment, and the next guy charges $275 to drill the lock … and then $225 for a new lock. We’ve sailed to $500 before he even starts to do any work. Then he begins to drill. Final price? $635, or about the cost of some laptops.
“It’s horrible!” Jerry Giamanco says, devastated by his colleagues’ deception. “That’s ridiculous. It’s a hundred-dollar job.”
Oh, but it gets better. This “professional” locksmith says his credit-card machine isn’t working, so he wants it all in cash.
“I don’t have $635 in cash,” says Ada.
“Maybe we could go to the bank or something?” asks the locksmith.
“The bank?” Ada asks.
When Ada resists, the locksmith calls his boss to ask for instructions. When he gets off the phone he tells Ada, “$685.”
Yep, the price has gone up.
“I don’t carry over $600 in cash on me,” says Ada, now speaking to the locksmith’s boss. “Tell him to take me to the ATM and then drive me back home? I don’t know.”
Now, in this case, Ada knows that she’s protected with cameras and a news crew. But how many vulnerable women are in this exact scenario? How many women are pressured to get into a car with a sketchy “professional” who’s looking for cash and who knows what else?
Enough. It’s time to step in. Watching this scene from my hiding place, and preparing myself for a confrontation with this shady locksmith, I feel the same thing I always do in these situations: Calm. It’s strange. In most real-life situations, conflict makes me so nervous that my teeth chatter. I’m the guy who’s too afraid to send back an overcooked steak at a restaurant. But when I’m about to confront someone on national television, with the risk of him taking a swing at me? Somehow I’m relaxed. I’ve prepared. I’ve done my homework. And I know I’m on the right side of the issue.
When you come face-to-face with this situation, you won’t have a big TV crew and producers in your corner. So here’s my advice for standing up for yourself without escalating the situation to conflict:
Challenge the locksmith or contractor (or whoever you think is ripping you off), by calmly saying things like, “Well I had another locksmith over here, and they told me something different.” Or: “This happened to me once before, and the locksmith charged me half of what you’re saying.” Another: “That seems a little steep, I should get a second opinion.” Most of them will start negotiating with you. Either way, you’re subtly signaling that you’re not about to get ripped off.
But since I do have a TV crew … let’s do it this way. I come out of hiding and approach the locksmith. “Experts say you could have picked this lock in under a minute, and it’s a hundred-dollar job. You charged her $685 and then demanded she pay you cash. You think that’s right?”
“How can I help you, sir?” he says, busted.
“You can answer my questions. Are you a licensed locksmith?”
“Yes, I am,” he says.
“Can I see your license?”
“No. You can’t see anything.”
“I’m just trying to figure out why you’re trying to charge someone more than six times what experts say that job should cost.”
“What do you want me to tell you?”
“What’s your name?” I ask him.
“What’s my name?” he snaps back, “What’s your name?”
“Jeff Rossen of NBC News.”
“Nice, nice name f$#k-face.”
Somehow we avoid a fistfight, and happily, Ada does not have to get in a car with this guy. But in the end, four out of the eight locksmiths we called charged us too much, according to our expert … and mangled our locks in the process.
And there’s more. We found some online locksmiths using fake addresses, making it nearly impossible to track them down if you want to lodge a complaint. Some are listed in parking lots, some track back to abandoned buildings, churches, and even schools.
There are a few things you can do to protect yourself. When you’re in this situation, first get the quote, and get it in writing. Then, before they start working, tell them, “I don’t have the cash on me, will you take a credit card?” This keeps things on the up and up.
And there are actually a couple of simple things you can do to keep yourself out of this scenario entirely. Leave a spare key at work or at a friend’s house. Here’s another: Before you have an emergency, when you have some free time on your hands, go into town and look for a legitimate locksmith—at an actual store in an actual building with actual employees. Get their card, program the number in your phone as “Locksmith,” so if you’re in a jam you won’t get hustled by a guy who calls you “f$#k-face.”
When the Bottom Falls Out … Literally
Your outdoor deck has a hidden danger. On the one hand, sure, what’s not to love about it? You invite people over and barbecue on it, let the kids play on it. We never think twice about it. The deck looks safe.
But according to experts like Frank Libero of the American Society of Home Inspectors, a full 80 percent of decks have safety concerns. Sometimes this never causes a problem. But sometimes you see the tragedy of what happened in Indiana, where a group of teenagers posed for their prom picture on the deck and then, without warning, BOOM! the deck collapsed and came crashing down. Luckily those teenagers all survived, but scenes like this happen every summer; it’s nearly a mathematical certainty.
Happily, there are a few easy ways to check and see if your deck is up to snuff. You’re talking to the least handy guy, ever. Trust me, anyone can do this. It will take less than five minutes to inspect your deck, and look for a few very simple red flags:
RED FLAG 1: NAILS. “The very first thing you want to look at is where your deck attaches to the house,” advises Ricardo Arevalo, a safety engineer with Simpson Strong-Tie. If the only method of attachment is nails, this is a signal of cheap, shoddy workmanship that could later cause a massive (and deadly) problem. A nail is smooth and pulls out very easily. They’re great for hanging pictures on your wall, but not so great as your deck’s foundational lynchpin. You need screws and bolts.
RED FLAG 2: ROTTING AND SPLINTERING WOOD. If the wood is rotted, it’s far more likely to rip itself from the main house.
RED FLAG 3: A WOBBLY RAILING. Even if you tell your kids, “Don’t lean against the railing!” it’s human nature, and of course the kid will lean against the railing. So make sure it’s sturdy.
RED FLAG 4: NAILS. Yep, it’s so important that I’m listing it twice. Trust me: If all you see are nails, call a professional to inspect it.
Another bit of advice from the experts: Check your deck once a year. Here’s a quick analogy: I’m fascinated by airplanes, so awhile back, I began taking classes to get a pilot’s license. (Technically I went even further and got an “instrument rating,” so I can fly in bad weather.) When I started training, the instructors told us to “treat every single flight like it’s your first.” In other words, I can’t assume that because I haven’t crashed in the last ten years, I’m not going to crash today. I have to remain vigilant. So with your deck, it’s tempting to think that because it was sturdy five years ago and sturdy yesterday, it will be sturdy for the next five years. Wood rots. Metal rusts. So unless you’re Bob Vila, it really is worth calling a professional home inspector.
Surviving Mother Nature
Whether you’re in your home or traveling to someone else’s, here’s how to survive three of the most punishing acts of Mother Nature: earthquakes, tornadoes, and lightning.
Copyright © 2017 by Jeff Rossen
