I need your help thinking up a name for a syndrome.

The syndrome occurs when a situation that we ordinary, wretched consumers have suffered for years and years happens to a politician. Then, all of a sudden, it morphs into a public crisis in need of legislative repair.

Maybe we can call it Waring Syndrome after Arizona State Senator Jim Waring, R-Phoenix.

It seems the senator’s cell phone company has done him wrong.

When it happens to you and me, we’re lucky if the cell phone service musters the energy and attention to shrug us off.

When it happens to a state senator, he gets a case of high dudgeon and lobs a bill into the hopper to create a "Cell Phone User’s Bill of Rights."

Oh well. Better late than never. Welcome to our world, Sen. Waring. Among the converts, there’s no such thing as "time in grade."

Waring’s bill (SB 1010) would permit cell phone customers to back out of a contract within 30 days without penalty for any reason.

There is precedent. In the 1980s, the health club and gym industry was plundering Arizona consumers. Elderly widows were fast-talked into signing 30-year membership contracts at health clubs for $20,000 to $30,000 a pop. Health spa operators even demanded full payment from the estates of contract holders who had died.

Those were the headline-grabbers, but the fitness industry as a whole was locking Arizona consumers into long-term, high-dollar contracts and refusing to let anyone off the hook.

The health club industry’s commercial tactics turned even the Legislature’s collective stomach. As a result, state law was changed so that a health club membership contract is the only one of its kind in Arizona, that allows a consumer to back out of it within three days, regardless of where the contract was signed. (Generally, the "3 Day Cooling Off Period" applies only to contracts signed in your home.) Further, health club contracts cannot run longer than three years. The law also limits down payments on health spa or gym membership contracts and, get this: If the customer wants to pay the entire cost of the contract in a single payment, the customer must ask in writing to be able to do so!

"Please oh please, grant me permission to give you all the money up front!"

For the past several years, the cell phone and wireless industry has claimed a place in the national Better Business Bureau system’s Top 10 most-complained-about industries. A couple of years ago, it even knocked franchised new car dealers out of their traditional number one spot.

Arizona’s cell phone industry trade association has gotten a whiff of Sen. Waring’s bill and will be throwing the obsequiousness generator into high gear during the 2008 session of the Arizona Legislature. A similar bill by another legislator disappointed in her wireless phone service was killed last year at the behest of the cell phone industry lobby.

There was a popular song that got a lot of radio play back in the 1980s about a series of denizens with "High Hopes." One of them was a ram who kept at it until he demolished a billion kilowatt dam. Maybe Sen. Waring’s effort will be the first crack in the structure that will eventually bring the whole thing down. We, too, can always have high hopes.

But in the meantime, shop carefully. When it comes to wireless and cell phone service, the best you can hope for is that you’ve locked yourself into serving a two-year sentence with the least crappy of the bunch.

Contact Tom Collier, president of the Better Business Bureau of Southern Arizona, through its website http://www.tucson.bbb.org or (520) 888-5353 or 1-800-696-2827 toll-free outside of Tucson. The office is a 434 S. Williams Blvd., Suite 102. The BBB of Southern Arizona serves Pima, Cochise, Santa Cruz, Graham, and Greenlee counties in Arizona and all of the state of Sonora in Mexico. Collier’s On Guard column appears the first week of each month.