Foot-In-Mouth Disease (Update)

Just an update on the continuing saga of our power situation.  You can read Foot-In-Mouth Disease and Foot-In-Mouth Disease (Size 22) for the history of this debacle.

This past Monday we received our April-May electricity bill.  It was $807.24 (BSD or USD - the currency trades at par here), which equates to about $1,500.00 Canadian.  The fuel charge part of this bill (which includes the additional surcharge referred to in the earlier post), was more than half of the total billing.

$807.24??  Granted, the charges were estimated, but definitely not based on the history of our consumption.  The estimated reading date was May 11.  We received the bill on May 17.

My mother was totally irate.  Like the dutiful daughter I am, I go and read the meter.  This being 6 days later, it showed a reading that was about 1000 kilowatt hours less than the estimated one.  Now, to figure out what the overcharge would be, one would need a math genius, a supercomputer and an algorithm even Einstein probably couldn't decipher.  Nah, I'm just to lazy to do the math, but the bills are insanely structured.

Moms went even further and called a reporter at the local newspaper, The Freeport News who was very interested in our story.  She listened to our concerns and complaints.  After collecting copy of the bill and photos of the meter a short article appeared in Wednesday's paper.  It wasn't the headliner, but it did appear on the front page.

Upon complaining to the power company, it admitted it did not estimate the bill based on our usage history and adjusted the bill to reflect the reading of May 17.  The new total:  $359.24.

I can't wait to see next month's bill.

Foot-in-Mouth Disease (Size 22)

Yeah,  I know it should say, "Part 2", but I'm talking about a foot, after all.

As a short follow-up to my last post, the power company made the following statements and/or assertions in the last couple of days (this is according to the local newspaper):

• (Friday):   After its apologizes for the inconveniences, it said the same inconveniences were "expected to continue into next week."
• (Saturday):  It was reported that the problems were fixed,  regular service had been restored and that no one should experience any further inconveniences.
• (Monday - we don't get a Sunday paper):  A notice is published to advise its customers their "fuel surcharge for the month of May" would be considerably higher.  WTF? Three days of questionable power supply equates to an entire month?  And since it isn't burning fuel to supply power, again, WTF?
• (Monday, again):  It admitted that it wasn't so quite up-and-running as previously claimed,  but it was going to rotate the inconveniences to randomly inconvenience those who weren't already inconvenienced.

It's now Tuesday.  It was just after 7 p.m. when one of these inconveniences was bestowed upon us. This time Bionic Bob advised us in a  pre-recorded message that we would be without power for about 2 to 4 hours (in other words, "until it reach").

Because of Hurricane Frances, we bought a generator - I just hope we have enough fuel on hand.

Foot-in-Mouth Disease

I think we've all been there, done that, etc.

I'll try to keep this short, but I really couldn't wait to post this:

For the past few days, we've been experiencing power outages all over the island.  It's been as hot as Hades here recently,  unusual for May,  which does nothing to alleviate the growing anger at the power company.

At the onset of this dilemma, we, like many others, called the customer service department (ad nauseum) to ascertain when power would be restored.  They first started out with some cock-'n-bull story about,   "dumping loads".  No shit! (and pun definitely intended).  Eventually, they got 'Bionic Betty' (my term for those automated answering systems) to spew out some pre-recorded excuse for the lack of service:

"Please accept our apologies but we are experiencing some technical and mechanical difficulties at this time.  We are working on restoring the power to your area as quickly as possible.  The Grand Bahama Power Company wishes to thank you for conserving power."

"...conserving power."  Really??   Like we have a choice?!?!?

Oy vey.

So, yesterday they had two articles in our one and only local newspaper (The Freeport News) about the power situation.  One of the articles quotes the Chief of the power company remarking, among other things, this gem:

"We apologize for any inconvenience that this is causing our customers.  We are trying to spread out the inconvenience as much as possible."

Really!  I shit you not!