CONTENTS FEATURE: Phone company fumble can make you disappear SPOTLIGHT: EditPros clients in the news NET NOTES: Captivating web sites FEATURE: Phone company fumble can make your company disappear      Illusionist David Copperfield has mesmerized audiences by making objects and people vanish during his stage performances. But any telephone company can perform an even more impressive stunt: making an entire company disappear—for a year.      A mistake by your local phone company can instantly obliterate your organization's "411" directory assistance listing. Precious months can elapse without your knowledge of the omission. And if the exclusion continues undetected beyond the publication deadline of the new paper phone directory, you'll find your listing eradicated from that as well.      That's precisely what EditPros experienced this May. Listed in phone books for the past nine years, EditPros was erroneously omitted from the business white pages of the newly published SBC Yolo County telephone directory.      Other Yolo County businesses also were omitted. The Sacramento Business Journal and the Davis Enterprise newspapers published articles about the vanished listings.      While restoring the "411" and 555-1212 directory assistance listings for EditPros, SBC representatives blamed the omission on the telecommunications carrier with which EditPros contracts for local and long-distance service. SBC publishes the printed directories by consolidating customer listings submitted by numerous phone companies. The accuracy of SBC's directory assistance and printed directories, therefore, is entirely dependent upon the integrity of the customer databases of each of those telecommunications carriers.      Phone companies have a vested interest in preserving the accuracy of their customer databases, but mistakes can occur. A human data entry error—such as deleting instead of transferring a file—or a computer software or hardware malfunction can send a business listing into oblivion. Such errors can be introduced when a business switches from one telephone carrier to another. But, perhaps most alarmingly, behind-the-scenes blunders can occur even without making a change in service.      EditPros has been in the same location with the same phone number for more than five years, and has made no changes in telephone carriers since November 2000. Yet an unexplained change in our phone company's records for the EditPros account took place in April 2002.      An SBC representative investigating the problem found that SBC wasn't supplied the EditPros name and number until May 7—two months after the publishing deadline for the Yolo County phone book.      Although unintentional, the unexplained change in our phone company's records resulted in deletion of the EditPros listing from the printed phone directory and from the "411" directory assistance database. Such an omission is seriously damaging because it can create the impression that a company has gone out of business.      Since phone companies apparently do not routinely reconcile their directory assistance databases with their actual customer records, what preventive action can business owners or managers of organizations take? They can do as we've decided: to call 411 monthly to make certain our listing remains intact.      If your business listing vanishes, immediately notify your phone company's business office. And if you discover that your listing has been deleted from the printed phone directory, request compensation. Depending upon your phone company and your state, you may be offered a discount or even complimentary telephone service for the period during which the erroneous printed directory is in effect.      Be vigilant, and you can protect your business from an unwitting role in a disappearing act. Yes! As always, you can reach EditPros by calling (530) 759-2000. SPOTLIGHT: EditPros clients in the news University of California farm pesticide safety training model adopted for national pilot program      A national pesticide safety training program conducted under the auspices of the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Office of Pesticide Programs is being modeled after a successful train-the-trainer program developed at the University of California (UC).      Since 1995 the Pesticide Safety Education Program operated by UC's Integrated Pest Management (IPM) office has trained more than 4,600 instructors. Those instructors ultimately will train more than 870,000 California agricultural field workers in safe handling and application of pesticides. The UC IPM Worker Protection Safety instructor manual and other related materials are serving as models for train-the-trainer programs throughout the United States.      The national pilot program effort began in 2000, when the United States EPA began an assessment of the Worker Protection Standard (WPS) by convening public meetings in Sacramento, Austin, Texas, and Orlando, Fla. UC IPM Pesticide Safety Education Program staff members attended all three meetings and actively participated in sessions dealing with training. The EPA subsequently formed three subcommittees, one of which was responsible for developing a pilot train-the trainer program to be tested in several states.      The EPA committee that helped to develop the national pilot program included Pat O'Connor-Marer. He is the pesticide safety training coordinator with UC IPM, and the outreach coordinator for the Western Center for Agricultural Health & Safety (WCAHS), an EditPros client based at the University of California, Davis.      O'Connor-Marer and pesticide safety educator Jennifer Weber developed the curriculum for the master trainer orientation and for the state pilot train-the-trainer programs. In March, O'Connor-Marer conferred with state and federal representatives in Arlington, Va., to review and refine the curricula. He and Weber subsequently met with the master trainers, state representatives and federal EPA representatives in Arlington and initiated the training sessions. They were given special recognition awards for their efforts by the EPA's Office of Pesticide Programs.      For more information, please contact Patrick O'Connor-Marer by e-mail or call (530) 752-7694. Net Notes: Captivating Internet resources FindArticles.com http://www.findarticles.com/PI/index.jhtml      FindArticles.com is an archive of hundreds of thousands of published articles that you can read and print in their entirety at no charge. It contains articles dating to 1998 from more than 300 magazines and journals. You can sort searched publications by category or name. FindArticles is a content-distribution partnership between LookSmart of San Francisco, which operates the search infrastructure, and the Gale Group of Farmington Hills, Mich., a publisher of research and reference materials for libraries and businesses. Ad Flip Classic Print Ads http://www.adflip.com/      Whether for fun, historical research or inspiration, enjoy this site, billed as the world's largest archive of classic print advertisements from the 1940s to the present. 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