t's high noon in Hanoi and you're struck with a deep hunger for, yes,   Choco-Pies,  those ubiquitous chocolate-covered cookies with the Uranium half-life.  You buy a box and eat, and minutes later you're ill. A bad shipment just hit the mean streets of urban Southeast Asia? Or a bit of fiddling with the expiration dates? No longer must Vietnamese tolerate consumer injustice -- now there's a number to call.

Did you put together 2.5 million dong (about $180) for a snazzy, much advertised Omega watch, as Pham Van Hoanh of Ho Chi Minh City did, only to discover you just bought a fake? Buy a Philco air conditioner that broke after four days, as did Le Thi Thuc, also of HCMC? Or are you a very curly-haired Hanoian woman with the firm knowledge that she's been ripped off by her hairdresser?

Mr. Do Viet Tinh and Mr. Do Quang Dat are waiting for you to dial. In fact, they're hoping you do.

Tinh and Dat are both engineers by training, and have six colleagues with various backgrounds. They dress like so many other party cadres: modest short-sleeved shirts, locally-made shoes, Chinese neckties. But instead of working Hanoi's halls of power, for higher tariffs against imports or more money from the government to sustain shoddy factories, these men spend their days working the phones at Vietnam Standard and Consumers Association (Vinastas), an independent, non-profit agency that operates out of an ordinary three-story house on Ton That Tung street in Hanoi. They advertise, field phone calls, publicize their issues to national media and even publish a monthly magazine. They do all of this toward the mission of educating Vietnamese consumers on their rights.

"Ten or 20 years ago, consumers didn't know how to complain," said Dat, Vinastas' secretary. "In today's market-oriented economy, they need to learn that it's their right."

Adds Tinh, chief of the 23-member organization, "manufacturers and producers have clubs to protect themselves, but consumers don't."

Now they do. Tinh and Dat report that theirs is "serious work" and with nearby testing labs and global affiliations, they are proud of their effect on Vietnamese consumers and producers alike. Said Tinh, "Sometimes the smallest thing can be the most dangerous. If the anti-theft lock on a motorbike doesn't work, what can happen at midnight?"

Vinastas is almost certainly Vietnam's first industry organization that is not a protectionist lobbying group but quite the opposite. At the root of the group, said Dat, is its integrity. For evidence, Dat cited the group's voluntary move to this house on the outskirts of Hanoi from its original space in the Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment's downtown office. "We needed to be independent," he said firmly.

The group was established in 1988 by Mr. Huang Tuan after he met representatives from the worldwide standards group Consumers International at a conference in Switzerland. It receives funding from Dutch church organization ECCO, with  government approval, Dat said. 

While they do consider themselves soldiers of the consumer, Vinastas's mission simultaneously includes  improving the quality of Vietnamese products, and even promoting those it considers excellent. 

Rather than stripping a company naked and dragging it through the public eye, Dat, Tinh and their colleagues take the low-keyed, Vietnamese approach of mediators. Tinh illustrates this with a story that is "small but important."

"One consumer bought an electric rice cooker that overcooks. She brought it in and looked very angry. Why? The first reason, overcooked rice. The second, it used too much power. And the third was that she had to bring it to our office to get something done. ' I bought from a famous store!' she said.

I informed the seller immediately. "Both sides had to apologize to each other, and seller agreed to honor a three-month guarantee."  That was the last Vinastas heard of the case.

Presently, patience is the operative word at Vinastas, accounting for the nascience of the country's consumption habits and practices that had for decades been based on arrogant monopolies and constant shortages. Tinh nevertheless reported that that the country's newly passed Civil Code does include an uncompromising consumer-oriented provision that "if anyone breaks a commitment, he shall be fined."

"We have three principals," says Dat, "to protect consumers, support good-quality products and guide implementation of Vietnamese law."

To that end, Vinastas sponsors the "Quality Club," a monthly meeting of about 60 private and state companies that discusses revolutionary new topics, such as adopting international-quality standards for products that have never before had to compete with imports on an equal level.

At times, the unenviable task of Vinastas is to let a company know that "their quality is smaller than their prestige," Tinh said. Yet despite the implications to a company director of the appearance of Msrs. Dat or Tinh at their front door, they claim they haven't yet been chased away by any pan-swinging executives.

Said Dat, "We investigate the product, the seller, the consumer and the producer before pointing a finger. Before confronting a producer, we research the way to best approach him. In fact, producers care more than ever about their prestige, which is why they care about our inquiries. If the product is determined to be counterfeit, they ask us to help collect the rest of them. Some ask how they can improve."

In fact, observe Dat and Tanh, the producer is often mistakenly accused. In the case of Choco-Pies, the most common complaint of the twenty or so they receive each month is that the seller has allowed them to bake in the sun too long. (In such cases they have a word with the sellers.)

While Vinastas did determine that the Philco was faulty, the  air-conditioning company offered to replace it or refund the money. This was subsequently reported in Vinastas's consumer magazine.

And the curly-haired lady claiming she'd been fleeced? "We went to the hairdresser and it turned out she was charged the fixed price posted on the wall," chuckled Tinh. "There was no way to protect that woman."