WatchdogNation.com is ready for a happy face. So a few weeks back I asked readers a simple question: “Do you have a recent example of exceptional customer service? Send me your words of praise with specifics.”

The stories I received did make me smile. Ready for some good news — for a change?

Banker who noticed

Alma Arguijo, a banker at a Wells Fargo branch on Poly Webb Road in Arlington, Texas noticed an elderly customer making strange withdrawals from his account.

She called the man’s daughter, Linda Bridges, who told me this story. The banker told the daughter she wasn’t allowed to provide details because of privacy laws. But she warned the daughter that something didn’t seem right.

The daughter looked into it and learned that her father had gotten involved with a con artist who was taking his money.

“We would never have known if it weren’t for Alma,” Bridges says. “She was familiar with my dad and his habits, and because she is conscientious, she saved him from financial ruin. I didn’t have any accounts at Wells Fargo, but I sure do now.”

I talked to Arguijo, but she declined to be interviewed. Privacy laws, you know? So I didn’t get to say: Good job! We need more folks to do that.

No water? No problem

When a water-main break Aug. 2 meant two days without water for Weatherford, Texas residents and businesses, Frieda Fern Davis says she didn’t miss a sip.

The 90-year-old is a resident of Sterling House of Weatherford, a seniors home where caretakers worked hard to make sure residents didn’t face any hardships.

After the water was restored, she wrote a letter to the head of the company, Brookdale Senior Living, to praise all the employees who hauled water from outside, prepared meals as best they could and worked diligently to keep the facility clean.

“We had two hot meals and a picnic supper each day,” she wrote him. “The food was good.”

Extra staff worked longer hours. Large water tanks were transported. Bathrooms were kept clean. Davis named names, too. Lots of them. I wish I could name them all. Oh, what the heck?

Custodian Lewis Barnes. Chef Juanita Perez. Cook Devona Johnson. Nurse Belinda Middleton. Coordinators Carol Teegarden, Michelle McCullough and Pam Hazelwood. And Mary Ann Boyd, who hauled the 500-gallon water tank.

Davis says, “It was unbelievable. I heard not one cross word. We put up a brave face.”

Her letter to the chief executive led to his sending certificates of appreciation to the acclaimed employees. Sterling House Director Terrie Lynn Harwell tells me she is planning a party for the presentation.

Deal sounds good

Scott Coleman of Fort Worth, Texas loves his high-quality, noise-canceling Bose headphones. When they broke a month ago, he was heartbroken. The warranty had expired.

He called the company, where an employee explained that his model was no longer made and repairs were not done. Then he was told about the company’s “trade-in program,” in which you can get a new pair at a reduced price.

Coleman was asked whether he would mind paying $89.95 for the $300 headphones.

Would he mind? Nothing he ever heard through the headphones sounded so sweet.

The day he told me the story was the day his new headphones arrived.

“I consider that pretty good service,” he says. Then he repeats a Watchdog mantra: “If you don’t ask, you’ll never know.”

Bad start, good finish

When a house painter called Mary Ann Sutter of Arlington, Texas to remind her that he was coming to her house to give an estimate, she chewed him out because he was supposed to arrive that day but didn’t show.

The painter, Greg Newhouse of 1-800-PAINTING, politely explained that he was supposed to come three days later.

Sutter admits that she “rudely barked at him.” The painter, though, replied in a professional and polite manner.

“After we hung up, I looked at my calendar, and, sure enough, he was right. It was another company that was supposed to be there Friday morning. I was so embarrassed.”

Hey, we’ve all been there.

“I did feel bad about getting on to him,” she repeats. But the painter showed no hard feelings. He arrived at the exact time on the appropriate day and gave an estimate. She hired him.

Now she says the paint job Newhouse’s crew provided was the best she had ever seen. Furniture covered, moved properly and restored as it was. No drip marks anywhere.

“To top it off, he called a few days later to see if everything was done to my liking. I’m still reeling about the best customer service I’ve had in many years.”

I told Newhouse what his customer said. “That’s nice,” he replied. “I’ve been called worse.”

Which is the whole point of this. Tired of the worst. So here’s to the best.

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Dave Lieber, The Watchdog columnist for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, is the founder of Watchdog Nation. The new 2010 edition of his book, Dave Lieber’s Watchdog Nation: Bite Back When Businesses and Scammers Do You Wrong, is out. Revised and expanded, the book won two national book awards in 2009 for social change. Twitter @DaveLieber

Let’s look at some of the cultural stars of the summer of 2010:

> The Jet Blue flight attendant who wouldn’t bandage his head cut and couldn’t wait a few more minutes to visit the airport bar.

> The 19-year-old man, a future movie subject no doubt, who ransacked homes, stole airplanes and eluded police.

> The big national bank ordered last week to pay California customers $203 million in restitution claims because a judge found it had manipulated transactions to boost the overdraft fees it could charge its own customers.

> The iconic techno company that knowingly lied for years about the strength of its signal bars on iPhones.

Every summer has its own personality. The hot summer of 2010 will be remembered for a growing despair among the people, as the economy turned downward, once again.

Amid this, we gasp at the successes (through his life’s failures) of the Barefoot Bandit, aka Colton Harris-Moore. We marvel at the chutzpah of Steven Slater, the airline attendant who now says he wants his old job back.

We give Steve Jobs and Apple a pass on the phone screen that lied to its customers for every day of usage. Well, he put up a slide that acknowledged, “We’re not perfect.”

And we accept the Wells Fargo court finding as business as usual in America, even though, U.S. District Judge William Alsup wrote, “The bank’s dominant , indeed sole, motive was to maximize the number of overdrafts and squeeze as much as possible” out of overdrawn customers. This story did not receive the attention it deserved (hence this quick post).

In your mind, how you would rank these poor acts of citizenship during the summer of 2010 in terms of their maximum damage to the American culture? And to you?

For me, the least upsetting is the Barefoot Bandit. My house wasn’t involved, and he didn’t steal my airplane (cause I don’t have one). He’s an amusing distraction. Look for the movie out next fall. Perfect, since he seems like a character out of the 1930s anyway.

#3 in harm is Apple. Any company that takes over the music industry and is about to take over the publishing industry is actually worthy of being a villain in a James Bond movie. Too big for its own good. But I don’t care. I’ve got a Blackberry.

Runner-up for most heinous is the Jet Blue dude. He’s in charge of the safety and well being of those passengers. They come first — or at least they’re supposed to. The only good he did was expose the lax security for those leaving JFK Airport. As one spokesman said, we’re good at watching who enters the airport; we’re not so good at watching them leave.

The winner? For me, founder of Watchdog Nation, it’s a no brainer: Wells Fargo.

You hurt your own customers.  You processed their biggest payments first, which increased your income from overdraft charges. Meanwhile, penalties for smaller charges piled up on customers, causing tremendous harm for them, and now, finally, great shame for you.

The Barefoot Bandit and the others have nothing on you.  They are a distraction. You took money that a judge says doesn’t belong to you. From your own customers!

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Dave Lieber, The Watchdog columnist for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, is the founder of Watchdog Nation. The new 2010 edition of his book, Dave Lieber’s Watchdog Nation: Bite Back When Businesses and Scammers Do You Wrong, is out. Revised and expanded, the book won two national book awards in 2009 for social change. Twitter @DaveLieber

Wells Fargo Bank and DeSoto, Texas police thought they caught a check forger when Randolph Shaheed walked into a bank in November and presented a check to be cashed for his new job as a mystery shopper.

The check was an obvious fake, police said, and they arrested Shaheed. He spent four days in jail and, after a Dallas grand jury indicted him, faced a felony charge for forgery that could have sent him back to prison for the rest of his life.

Shaheed, 60, is a convicted murderer who served his time for crimes committed as a gang member decades ago in Fort Worth. But he has spent the past quarter-century working to do the right thing and help ex-cons fit back into society through his prison ministry.

Two days before his arrest, he was honored by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice for his work helping ex-offenders. State officials told me he was an “ideal” ex-offender who tried to “promote positive change within our community.”

Dave Lieber, The Watchdog columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, looked at the correspondence between Shaheed and the supposed mystery shopper company. I quickly concluded that the company was a fraud. Shaheed had been scammed, not the other way around.

But DeSoto Police Capt. Ron Smith was not so believing. He told me in December, “Don’t believe everything you hear.” He warned, “It’s not his first experience in the criminal justice system.” He added that he would be “surprised if it turned out to be a scam.”

Well, surprise!

The Dallas district attorney’s office dropped the charges against Shaheed last month. The office didn’t respond to my requests for comment, but Shaheed’s lawyer told me what happened.

“Fortunately, we had a very reasonable prosecutor who asked to see the evidence,” lawyer Valencia Bush said. “When you see all the correspondence back and forth, you can see these people are being duped.”

Bush told me she recently represented four clients who fell for the same scam and were wrongly arrested. But Shaheed’s was the most difficult to get charges dropped because of his criminal record.

“He’s a good guy that’s been doing nothing but good works in the community,” she said. “Certainly, he wasn’t about to risk his freedom for a couple of hundred bucks.”

Here’s how the scam worked: Shaheed thought he found a job on the Internet as a shopper who would test customer service at Western Union and other stores.

Here’s the job description in the original email.

He was sent a check for $1,950. All he had to do, he was told in written instructions, was cash the check and send $200 back to the company as a Western Union money transfer. The rest was for him to use for mystery shopping to evaluate businesses, he was told. Afterward, he would file reports about his experiences.

The scam comes in when a bank cashes a check, then later realizes it is a fake. The supposed mystery shopper had already spent the money and wired the rest to the scammers.

The shopper is responsible for the losses. But arrests for the crime are rare. Most banks know about the scam and warn off customers before it’s too late.

The Wells Fargo bank branch manager and a corporate spokeswoman both declined to answer questions about this.

The Mystery Shopping Providers Association, which represents legitimate mystery shopper programs, is based in Dallas. Executive Director John Swinburn told me the scam works because victims are often desperate for money.

“They feel this is something that was put in their lap to help them out, and they fall for it.”

The way legitimate mystery shopping typically works, he said, is that shoppers are asked to make very small purchases for a few dollars or may not make any purchases at all. Their subsequent reports to the companies that hire them are more about customer service and store appearance.

“If they make a purchase, they get reimbursed,” he said. “Nobody would send you a big check if they don’t know you, and if they haven’t already established a relationship with you.”

Shaheed told me, “The lesson I learned from this is to be very, very skeptical about things that you read about on the Internet that are offering you a job opportunity.” He now owes several thousand dollars in legal fees that he says he doesn’t have.

I checked back with the DeSoto police captain who originally told me to be suspicious about Shaheed’s story.

“What’s the old saying about a leopard not changing his spots?” the captain asked. “Some people do, but that’s not usually the case. That’s been my experience.

“It’s not our job to judge people. It’s our job to determine if a crime has been committed. If we think it has, then we file a case. … Obviously, when we file these cases, we have probable cause to file it, unless we have something to indicate this is a scam.”

The police captain urged me to check with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to find out what the recidivism rate is for ex-cons in Texas. How many offenders commit other crimes and get sent back to prison?

I did as he suggested. The answer: 27 percent go back within three years. (Here’s the report.)

Randolph Shaheed is not one of them.

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Final note: After a reader read this initial story in the Dave Lieber column in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the mystery reader came forward and paid off Shaheed’s legal bill. “I’m ecstatic,” Shaheed told Dave afterward.

Read the original WatchdogNation.com report here.

Watch a documentary film on Randolph Shaheed by filmmaker Mickey Grant, still incomplete by clicking on this Mickey Grant link.

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Dave Lieber, The Watchdog columnist for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, is the founder of Watchdog Nation. The new 2010 edition of his book, Dave Lieber’s Watchdog Nation: Bite Back When Businesses and Scammers Do You Wrong, is out. Revised and expanded, the book won two national book awards in 2009 for social change. Twitter @DaveLieber