A common misconception about Northeast COMBAT is that the people we help are likely to be poor, defenseless creatures with limited coping skills who can’t help themselves. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Indeed, many of our clients include the defenseless, such as elderly people with limited resources or working parents who are struggling to maintain a household and are unfamiliar with their rights.

But many who seek our help are capable, well-educated professionals who have discovered the hard way that all those legal protections and helping agencies they trusted have failed them, and at the end of the day, they were alone.

Such was the rude awakening faced by Pauline of Camden, a mathematician with a doctorate who, in her spare time, is an audiophile.

Pauline was shopping her stereo catalogs for an audio mixer when she found a piece of equipment that promised to be just what she needed to turn her basement into a sound studio. The company, AudioTechnix of Burbank, Calif., offered a “full money back, no questions” guarantee on its products. Wanting to be certain the $2,598 audio mixing console fit her needs, she called the company, requesting the unit’s specifications. Everything seemed right, so she filled out the order form and sent her personal check off to California.

Two weeks later, the mixer arrived and Pauline hurried to her basement to unbox the unit and start plugging wires into it.

She was immediately uneasy when she took the mixer out of the bubble wrap to discover it seemed of incredibly cheap manufacture. But not wanting to judge a book by its cover, Pauline proceeded to follow the instructions and, one by one, began to attach stereo components to the unit.

Several hours and dozens of plug-ins later, she felt ready to give it a test. But when she tried to use the sliding volume controls, they stuck, and the sound broke up as the levers were moved so she couldn’t get consistent sound levels.

Further, when she tried to record, the sound would break up, even if the levers weren’t touched. Even more, the dials that switched from one component to another malfunctioned. She couldn’t even get her turntable to send music to the CD burner.

Being a patient sort, Pauline decided to take the unit to a stereo repair shop in Portland to have it checked before returning it to AudioTechnix. Within three days the repair shop called to tell her the mixer was “poorly manufactured foreign junk” and that it looked like “someone had turned a chimpanzee loose with a soldering iron on the thing.”

Pauline called the company and said she was displeased and wanted her money back. AudioTechnix told her to repack and return the mixer in the original shipping carton, which she dutifully did.

Two years later Pauline still had not received a refund from the company. What she encountered over those 24 months is a classic example of how no matter how smart and careful you are, no matter how articulate, no matter how good you are at problem solving, it’s a jungle out there and finding help isn’t easy.

Pauline did everything right, and contacted virtually every government agency and organization she could think of. None would, or could, help – until she finally contacted COMBAT. Next week, Part II: a blow by blow description of Pauline’s efforts on her own behalf, and how tenacity often pays off.

Consumer Forum is a collaboration of the Bangor Daily News and Northeast COMBAT-Maine Center for the Public Interest, Maine’s membership-funded nonprofit consumer organization. Individual membership $25, business rates start at $125 (0-10 employees). For help and information write: Consumer Forum, Bangor Daily News, P.O. Box 1329, Bangor 04402-1329.