Every so often, a company I do business with will try to sell me on the convenience of automatic bill payment. Just sign up for their service, they promise, and whenever your bill comes due, the money will come right out of your checking account, automatically, with no need for you to worry your pretty little head about it. Not surprisingly, these offers don't appeal to me, because I like to maintain as much control over my money as possible. I want to know exactly how much a bill is going to be before I pay it, for three good reasons:
- to make sure there's enough money in checking to cover it, so that I won't be stuck with an overdraft fee;
- to make sure the bill itself is accurate; and
- so that I won't forget to look over my bills and take note of any expenses that I need to rein in for the future.
Well, I simply were given a way to that query. My software bill for the month of February, which arrived at the twenty third, have become about $2 hundred higher than I predicted it to be. This is a combined invoice, with separate fees for herbal gasoline and strength. The gasoline a part of the invoice regarded super; our gas usage for February was more or less similar to it had been in January, and in fact an excellent bit lower than it have been in February of 2011. But the electrical detail confirmed widespread usage of 1165 kilowatt-hours?Greater than 5 times as lots as we would applied in January, or, for that depend, each different month in the beyond year.
At first, I become flummoxed. I attempted to consider what may additionally need to possibly have improved our energy usage that an lousy lot?The latest expand light for our seeds? The electric powered area heater we ran more than one times whilst running within the basement? But after a second's reflected photo, it occurred to me that possibly the meter analyzing turned into clearly incorrect. I went out and checked the electrical meter, and I positioned that the analyzing as of that date, February 23, turn out to be 61944, and the studying indexed on our bill, dated February 16, was 62902. At that factor, it come to be apparent what had occurred: the second dial become proper on the line among 1 and a couple of, and the meter reader with the aid of hazard study it as a 2 while it need to had been a 1. A easy mistake, and one which should be easy to repair, right?
Well, you would think so. I called up PSE&G and explained the situation, and they said, no problem: just give me the actual reading you took yourself, and we'll send you out a new bill with that reading in place of the one we used. So I said fine, gave them my reading, and hung up, thinking that the matter was now taken care of. Ha ha, silly me. My new bill arrived on the 25th, and the electric meter reading on it was...62902, exactly the same as on the first bill. The only change they'd actually made was to remove the charge for "clean energy certificates" that we normally pay.
So I called PSE&G again and explained the situation once more, adding that my previous call hadn't fixed the problem. They said they couldn't understand why, but they promised to send out a new bill with my meter reading from the 23rd, and they assured me that this time the change really would be made. Well, you can probably guess what happened: a new bill arrived on the 29th, and the total was exactly the same as on the second bill. I checked the electric section, and sure enough, the meter reading was still 62902.
Okay, I thought, maybe the third time's the charm. I called them once more and told them that I had now received three inaccurate bills in a row, and they once more expressed puzzlement and promised to send out a new bill using my meter reading. I asked them to please double-check and confirm that the number listed for the meter reading was now 61944, and they assured me that yes, it really was. I hung up the phone still feeling skeptical and decided that if I got a fourth bill and the reading was still wrong, I'd go down to the nearest PSE&G office in person and see if I could fix it that way.
The new bill arrived today, and I was pleased to see that it was indeed much lower than the first three. But just to make sure, I flipped to the electric section to make sure they really had used my reading from the 23rd. Well, they hadn't; instead they'd given me an "estimated reading" of 61879. Still, that wouldn't have been a problem by itself; it was pretty close, and any discrepancy would be corrected when they took the reading for March. But then I looked at the next line and I saw that instead of the actual reading from the previous bill in January, they'd inserted the actual reading from November: 61400. So now, though they'd corrected the reading for February, they were attempting to re-bill us for two months' worth of electricity usage that we'd already paid for!
This story doesn't have an ending yet, as PSE&G has neither office hours nor a phone line available on Sundays. At this point, my plan is to go down to their office tomorrow, armed with hard copies of the four inaccurate bills I've received so far, as well as my bill from January (so that I can prove a reading actually was taken that month) and a photo of my electric meter as of today (reading: 62000). Then I plan to lay out the story in full detail and refuse to leave until they give me, in my hand, an accurate bill for February, with both the correct February reading and the January reading. At that point I will hand them, in return, a check for the actual amount I owe, and that, I sincerely hope, will be that.
And if they ever try again to talk me into paying my bill automatically, I will not hesitate to tell them exactly why I don't think that's a good idea.
