Weirdos Need Not Apply

I've discovered that if you recline your lounge chair just right and make a "V" with your feet, you can see your TV screen perfectly. This will hold true for up to a 27-inch screen at a distance of 15 feet. If you have one of those monster 60-inchers and your viewing chamber is about the size of a room at a Motel 6, forget it -- you'll pop out your knees trying to accommodate.

Recently, I was in the above optimal viewing position when that Nice Lady from the dental referral service came on. I have always admired this person. She seems genuinely concerned about the plight of thousands of people whom she perceives as having no dentist of their own and wandering about willy-nilly, clueless about how to connect with a professional tooth person. What are these people to do, she worries, twin furrows appearing between her brows. She is not actually wringing her hands, but you can tell she's close to tears.

Before the impact of her agitation can upset viewers to the point of upping their dose of medication, she quickly beams the following message to unfortunates "out there" bereft of a DDS they can call their own: Why take a chance picking a strange dentist from the Yellow Pages? If you've flipped through the Yellow Pages recently, you can appreciate that the odds of getting a strange one are excellent. He could be buying his supplies from Earle's House of Toxic Materials or secretly using ordinary tap water for rinses, for all you know.

Would you choose a brain surgeon in this manner? Or a blind date, unless you're really, really hard up? What can you really KNOW about this person other than the fact that the bigger and more garish the ad, the more it's costing him a month -- a nut that's bound to be reflected in his fees, if you get my drift.

As far as asking for a recommendation from a neighbor who is insensitive enough to own a beagle who barks non-stop and to leave the emptied trash barrels out front for two days, forget it! Also, none of your friends' teeth, upon close inspection, look all that good anyway, so what could they know about dentists?

Well, stop worrying, she comforts those few who haven't developed an aversion to talking heads and clicked to another channel. We have carefully and thoroughly screened -- YES! screened thoroughly and carefully -- a select few dentists in your area that meet our rigorous criteria. We know everything about them from where they went to school to what, if any, their specialty is and whether they played any significant part in Paula Jones' makeover.

Watching this, I am devastated. Much as I would like to belong to this elite group of carefully screened dentists, I know I could never survive the investigation. That time I was caught sleeping in the pharmacology lecture during my junior year and that ugly episode with the spilled merthiolate in a patient's lap would certainly be unearthed in even the most superficial screening.

This referral message -- repeated nightly over the years -- has left me depressed, on the outside, looking in. I feel that my patients have found me quite by accident and at the first chance of learning details of a more qualified provider, will desert me in a heartbeat.

But wait! The tone of tonight's referral commercial has taken on a different imperative. The Nice Lady is visibly upset. Oh, she tries to hide it beneath some of the same references to the cream-of-the-crop professionals she has painstakingly researched, but no mistake, there's a new urgency to the message. It seems that some of you viewers -- you know who you are, she gently accuses -- have NOT called this 800 number we thoughtfully flash on the screen 50 times during this 30-second public announcement. There's no doubt she is hurt and disappointed. I feel terrible. I'm acutely aware of the fact that, because I could never pass the rigorous screening to achieve a position on this Alpha list, the Nice Lady doesn't know I exist, but that doesn't mean I don't have empathy for a person giving her all for the advancement of dentistry.

What's going to happen? She asked politely for us to call for a referral. Perhaps some of us called, but obviously not enough. These TV spots cost a bundle and the participating dentists grow restive without tangible results.

She chides us, giving us one more chance to do the right thing. There's a clear imputation that if we don't get to the phone forthwith, the gloves are coming off, and we are going to witness a hard sell the likes of which we haven't seen since Clinton tried to define some common terms as he sees them.

I've grown fond of the Nice Lady and don't want to see this happen. I want you and your friends to call that 800 number right now and get the name of a dentist. If you already have a dentist, get another one -- get two or three -- otherwise we may well be seeing the beginning of the end for public-spirited broadcasts such as this one, and the Nice Lady will have to go back to selling time shares in the Aleutians.