The Great Renuzit Can Scandal

A tulip, by any other name...

...can get your company in a bunch of trouble.

In 1995, I was living in Scottsdale, Arizona, where I worked for the Dial Corp. As the name might suggest, the Dial Corp is the manufacturer of Dial Soap. But they also have many other products under their banner, other brands they've purchased over the decades. Purex Detergent is one. Breck Shampoo is another. They even own a line of canned meats - Armour Star (maker of fine Vienna Sausages. No, they're really not fine...). From bleaches to wood polish, corn starch to hair color, the Dial Corp has it all. And when I started working there, they had even recently purchased a whole line of air fresheners. Renuzit air fresheners, to be exact.

My job title at Dial was "Consumer Information Representative". Here's how my job worked. Let's say you have a bottle of Liquid Dial in front of you. If you were to pick it up and look on the back, you'd find some small print that provided you an 800-number to call if you had any questions, comments or complaints about the soap. I was the person at the other end of the phone, there to listen to your soapy rantings.

People who heard what I did for a living would often look at me with a baffled, amused smile and ask what people could possibly have to call about. You would be surprised. I sure was in my first weeks on the job. I, myself, had never considered placing such a call in my life. But many, many consumers did. Mothers would call to ask if it was safe to wash their cursing child's mouth out with our bar soap (our legally safe answer was that we did not recommend it for that use). People would call when they couldn't find one of our products in their area anymore, trying to track down a store that carried it (this was especially traumatic for users of Breck Hair Color, including one panicked woman who stated that her own husband didn't even know what her real hair color was...and for some reason she didn't want him to find out). Folks with allergies wanted to double-check and be sure certain ingredients weren't in our food products. Observant Jews wanted to know if certain products were kosher. Kids doing reports for school would call to get help on their homework. Women would swear at me for twenty minutes when stains didn't come out of their laundry. People would claim injury from our products - slipping on soap, a sliver of glass in their food, a rash from our fabric softeners. Lonely housewives would semi-regularly call me from the bathtub (careful to point out their location to me at the start of the call) with unimportant questions, just to have the thrill of the clothes-free conversation (I was like Richard Gere, if Richard Gere knew way too much about antibacterial vs. regular soap). People sure they were going to be rich would call with new product ideas they'd come up with, only to see their dreams dashed when I had to tell them that we didn't accept outside ideas. An angry father once called me when, after he'd sprayed some of our air freshener in the parrot's cage, the beloved family pet dropped dead, and the kids were due home in about an hour and he had no idea what to tell them (tell them their father should have known better than to spray a chemical all over an exotic bird?). One of my favorites was when a woman in Arkansas, quite distressed, called me to let me know that we'd ruined a breakfast she'd held for some visiting friends when it turned out that two cans of our Armour Star product called (I'm not making this up, and this sells fairly well in the south) "Pork Brains in Milk Gravy" had been bad, and her guests were so disappointed because they'd been looking forward to some brains and eggs.

So after just over a year of this kind of thing, I'd thought I'd heard it all in my job.

Ever notice how the minute you think something like that, the universe snickers and rubs its hands together?

We started getting some strange calls one morning. More and more of the same call kept coming in. Soon enough, management had to call us in for an emergency meeting. Apparently, we had a problem. And it was clear from the look on our manager's face that it was one she did not feel comfortable discussing.

The Renuzit line is made up of many products, varying by scent and by type. There is, for example, the Citrus Sunburst fragrance. If you like this fragrance, you can get it in a variety of product types, ranging from aerosol sprays to "adjustables" to plug-ins to carpet fresheners. Consumers were quite apt to call and let us know which fragrances they loved and loved not so much, and we'd take their comments, thank them, and send them coupons for future purchases. That was one nice part of the job that I never got in any occupation thereafter - the ability to brighten a customer's day with the promise of an envelope full of coupons at the end of the call. People who call 800-lines LOVE coupons. I feel that if 976-numbers had offered coupons, they'd still be around for heavy-breathers to this day.

One popular fragrance was Fresh Cut Flowers. And why not? What person (who is not a guy, who could therefore care less) doesn't enjoy the scent of flowers, much less the freshly-cut variety? The graphics on cans and other containers for this product made its title clear - it was a photo filled with a pleasing variety of wild flowers, one that promised a veritable florist shop's-ful of nasal delight for the purchaser. This photo was a recent change to the product, one that, I'm assuming, tested well with focus groups, and had shipped some time before, gracing all the different product varieties of Renuzit Fresh Cut Flowers (or "FCF", as we of the Consumer Information Center knew it, as this was the code we typed in on our DOS-based computer system when we took a call concerning it).

There was a problem.

On the aerosol spray can, a metal seam ran down the length of the can, top to bottom, and that seam cut off the photo in a spot that was not cropped on any of the other FCF products. The part of the photo it dissected, on one portion of the can, was the curled petal of a tulip. Just a tulip petal, nothing scandalous, nothing that would have raised an eyebrow in the art department when the photo was being approved.

But when that seam cut off the tulip petal, a situation created completely by chance? It no longer looked like a tulip petal.

It looked like a penis.

There was an ensuing period of "Where's Waldo" in our meeting at that point, all of us looking at the cans and trying to find it, believing this must be some kind of joke. It was no joke (even though most of us were trying hard to remain professional and not snicker). If you knew where to look, you could find it. Now, seeing as how we, in the Center, all had access to the other products, we could pick up, say, a can of the powdered carpet freshener and see the uncropped photo, and clearly see that it was a rolled up tulip petal, as we could see the whole flower there. But that unfortunate seam had done its work, and done it well enough for someone, in some store in America, looking at cans and trying to decide which scent would best accentuate their trailer home, to spot it, do a double-take, and become convinced that there was clearly a veiny, tiny penis in the photo.

As the old 70s shampoo commercial goes - they told two friends, and they told two friends. And so on, and so on, and so on...

Word had started to spread, and quickly spread far enough to start reaching a couple of morning radio shows. It was then the fires were really lit, and the Renuzit Penis urban legend was born. As the concocted story went, the photographer responsible for that photo had found out he was losing his job. Disgruntled and vengeful, he decided to get a little payback on his last day on the job, and he...well...inserted himself into the photo. It was a story with absolutely no basis in anything even close to a fact. But it was a GOOD story. A story with a penis in it.

And thus began the Renuzit scandal, and the living nightmare for all of us who worked the call center at the Dial Corp. Calls started flooding in. Some were just people trying to verify the story, and we were MORE than anxious to dispel the myth, and offer to send them a color copy of the entire photo to review, or recommend that they go to their local Wal-Mart and pick up the carpet freshener and see the uncropped photo for themselves. People, of course, didn't want to do that, because the false story was, let's face it, much more fun. Add to that the fact that many of these people had been telling this story to every friend and relative they had, with an air of insider information in their confident reporting, and didn't want to sound the fool for being duped.

Others calling in were not curious, but outright angry. There was a rising fundamentalist rage over a trusted consumer product manufacturer introducing pornography to unsuspecting store shelves. You expect that kind of smut in the cosmetics aisles with all the half-naked hussies posing on the boxes, but the air freshener aisle is supposed to be a family aisle! Many of these angry callers were also parents, as this story spread through schools with ridiculous speed, and children were impressing each other with this shocking (yet giddily pleasing) tale, often bringing their mother's can of X-rated air freshener to class with them. One distraught mother told me that her young son, since finding this out, had been unable to keep his hands off the can...or himself (her words).

Most, however, were callers that completely eroded my faith in the American adult public, something that not even people calling to scream at me "It doesn't SAY anywhere on the bottle of bleach not to wash your dog with it!" had accomplished. Some of them couldn't even make it through the call they were snickering so much. Grown men and women became sniggering adolescents at the sight of an imaginary winky. Some even tried yelling while they were doing it, threatening to sue, but couldn't contain their laughter and pull it off. Some calls were less humorous and more...well...sexual. This was the hardest part for me - not for me personally, but for how I felt for my fellow workers, who were almost exclusively women, who spent the next few months going through their work day in a state of, essentially, constant sexual harassment. Guess we were cheaper than a 976-number. Plus, you know...coupons.

The media had fun. Morning radio was practically born for moments like this. We got wind of one "wacky" morning show doing a live broadcast from the local Target, handing the can to unsuspecting passersby and asking them to take a close look at see what they saw. The brief pause would then be followed by an "OH MY GOD!", and hilarity would ensue. This got so far that the then-undisputed king of morning radio - yes, Howard Stern - picked up on the story. He called our center and got Danette, the girl who sat next to me and a good friend, on the line. Danette was a very sweet girl, whose whole goal in life was to become a contemporary Christian singer. And she had to be the one Stern got on the line. I was sitting there when it happened. She calmly and emotionlessly said, "Please hold". And she put him on hold. She looked at me, told me who it was, and said, "There's no way I'm going to end up being 'The Renuzit Girl'". She took off her headset and walked to our manager's office to discuss it. In the end, she left Stern on hold so long he hung up. That probably didn't help much with casting doubts on the photographer story.

So we took the abuse, as such was our duty. Day in, day out, the phallic phone calls came, with callers enraged, aroused, or enjoying themselves immensely, and none of them believing our explanation of innocence. I felt bad for the poor folks with valid Pork Brains issues that couldn't get through to voice their lament. The Dial C.I.C. became All-Penis, All-The-Time. Even my personal, and sizable, adoration for being a part of anecdotal awesomeness like this could only last so long. There are only so many ways to say "It's not a penis, ma'am", and only so many times you can say it before (hard to believe, I know) it gets old. I became a dork-denying drone, going through the motions, praying, for once, for a finch to drop dead to break the monotony. There was no joy in Dialville - we were not a happy group of workers.

Thankfully, the United States of America is held up by two unifying foundations - individual freedom, and short attention span. The calls did eventually trickle off. Bill Clinton was in the White House, after all, so there were other penis scandals to be found. And we had O.J. to thank for further distraction. By the time I left the employ of the Dial Corp to move back to California, only a handful of penis (I'm interrupting the sentence right there to make you chuckle so you can feel like one of our callers) queries (I chose that word for the same reason) were slipping through (bwahahaha!), but they would no longer be my problem. My days of bar soap rashes, laundry disasters, spoiled Brains and Fresh Cut Penises were over.

Oh, but you can bet your ass I took one of those cans with me. I may have given up on Brains, but I'm no dummy.


NOTE: As with all urban legends, even ones that come from such a doubtless source as me...always double-check them on Snopes.com.