Bills

I have been traveling for work a bit and when I do, my husband and I have to be on our game. We are like a well oiled machine. Every time I come and go we do the changing of the guard. I go over the schedule, meals, and everything he needs to know and when I get back he tells me how everything went and what I need to do. 

We were having our changing of the guard convo last week and my husband told me that I need to keep an eye out for the cable bill because he had to call them and address an issue. "Get this - they sent a letter saying that they audited our account and discovered that they aren't charging us rental fees for our wireless modem so they want to increase our bill by $7 a month." I laughed out loud. I find it surprising that they want to charge us for renting a modem from them when we OWN our modem. We have never rented a modem, we got ours for $40 seven years ago. If we had rented one from the cable company we would have paid almost $600 by now. What a rip off. I'm sure they will still charge us the $7 and I will have to call them every month for the next 6 months because they are incompetent and trying to suck every penny they can out of us.

We have had the worst luck with utility companies. The cable company has been on my sh*t list for a while. We have used the same company for 6 years because they have a monopoly in our area. We only pay for internet. We don't have cable TV - just very basic internet cable. We have paid the same amount every month for the past 4 years. They send us our bill electronically. Well, last October I went to log on to the internet and it said my cable was disconnected. I pay my bill every month so I called and they said I owed them $190. They increased our bill by $4 a month but never sent us a notice. So when I paid every month, I paid our regular rate. Every month for 10 months they charged us a $15 late fee because the $4 went unpaid and then waited until we accrued a butt-load of fees. I protested and stated that they didn't send us a notice and that they should have notified us by mail if we were getting late fees. Too bad, was their response. I acknowledged that I should have looked at my bill more closely and sucked it up and paid the $190 plus a $90 re-connection fee. But I told the lady that I feel bad that she works for a horrible company that ruins dreams and sucks the life out of people. I HATE them. Google internet can't come fast enough.

It's not just the cable company. When we were living in Texas I got an electric bill for $236,000. Seriously. I looked at it and thought, I know I have been keeping the air conditioning at 72, but this is a little outrageous. So I called and gave them my account number and the lady asked what my problem was and I said, "Well, I got a bill for $236,000 and that can't be right." She was like, "Yes, that's what you owe this month." Really? Does ANYONE ever owe $236,000 in electric bills for one month? This lady was dumb as a bag of rocks. "Well, I live in a 450 square foot, one bedroom apartment." There was silence on the other end. She told me not to pay it and I didn't even get billed that month. That part was awesome.

The worst ever though was AT&T. The name alone makes my blood boil. I got a letter from AT&T when we were living in Texas stating that I owed a $900 delinquent bill and they were shutting off my phone service. I called them to see what was going on. The lady said, "I see here that you owe $900 from when you lived in Fort Worth in 1999 that you never paid." "I didn't live in Fort Worth in 1999." "Is your name ------- ?" I said, "Yes - NOW it is. That is my married name. I didn't get married until 2002. Not only did I have a different name in 1999, I lived in New Jersey and was a minor and would not have even been eligible to open a residential account at that time." "Well, you owe this money." "It's not me." She transferred me to a man who berated me for not paying my bills and called me a liar, then I got transferred to someone else, who transferred me to someone else, then I was on hold for 40 minutes. At one point I thought, Let them turn off my phone. I will just write letters. Finally a lady picked up and asked for my social security number. I gave it to her and she said, "I'm so sorry. We have the wrong person. I will make a note of this. Have a nice day!" It was a 3 hour ordeal. I am not lying. I wasted 3 hours of my life that day and I am still bitter about it. I could have done so many things in those 3 hours. I could have volunteered at a homeless shelter, cleaned up a local park, cleaned my house, had an afternoon delight, read a parenting book. I could have been a better person if it wasn't for AT&T. Evil. Pure Evil.

Anyway, the evening I got home my husband and I laid in bed and commiserated about how much we hate the cable company. He sighed, "It makes me just want to live off the grid. We could grow our own food, use candles instead of electricity." I agreed, "I can learn to play the fiddle. We'll can our own food. We can have a sawdust toilet." My husband gave me a weird look, "Okay, maybe we won't live off the grid."