Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, April 5, 1991                   TAG: 9104050066
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG                                LENGTH: Medium

THIS TIME, C&P'S GOT HIS NUMBER

He was here, in Blacksburg, at his Rent-A-Wreck auto leasing business.

The call, about a year ago, was from the other franchise he owns, on Peters Creek Road in Roanoke.

"My manager up there called me. She asked if I had seen the phone book. Then she told me, and I just went, `Uggggghhhhh,' " Burtner says.

"Uggggghhhhh" is not a good description, but it is the best that written letters can do.

He is leaning heavily into the back of his chair. His eyes are rolling back into his head. His face is turning the color of cigarette ash. The sound he is making is like a bad actor's death rattle - gurgling and moaning.

If Heimlich were around, he would maneuver Fred Burtner.

But Burtner's agony was real.

The new Roanoke telephone book, hot off the press, had just been delivered. The phone number in his big Yellow Pages ad was wrong.

It listed the Blacksburg phone number - a long-distance call from Roanoke.

Callers would be directed by that annoying three-note computer ditty that their call could not be connected as dialed. You must first dial a "1."

"Let's be honest. They don't want to do that. Nobody does. They say, `The heck with it.' There are lots of rental places in Roanoke," Burtner says.

He took out newspaper ads to tell consumers about the Yellow Pages mistake, but let's be honest. The phone book is the granddaddy of advertising, the book of ages. It is The Source.

He reached a settlement, the details of which he prefers not to divulge, with C&P Telephone and isn't bitter about the error.

And he doesn't have the guts to put pencil to paper to figure out how the mistake affected the rental business he has owned since 1988.

If he knew how much the blunder cost, he might set to gurgling for real. Best he can guess, business was flat. It didn't collapse, nor did it grow a whole lot.

But Fred Burtner's year in hell has come, mercifully, to an end. There are 188,000 new phone books being delivered now in the Roanoke Valley.

Burtner, afraid to look at first, finally did peek. Rent-A-Wreck's phone number is correct.

Heimlich can go home. Fred Burtner gurgles no more.

But he remembers that choking sensation.

He is pointing at the phone book on his desk: "You screw up that big boy and you're out of luck. C&P won't print up 250,000 new books because of you.

"Newspapers, radio, television, key rings, business cards, anywhere else you advertise, you can correct an error. That thing stays around all year," he says, still staring at, haunted by, the phone book.

"That Yellow Pages story, that's one I hope and pray to God I never have to go through again."

He still has to wait for the New River phone book, coming soon to a doorstep near you. The potential for error is still there, and Fred Burtner knows he is not out of the woods yet.

But he's close.

He's not gurgling.

And he's still in business.

A guy can ask no more.