Posted on 02/26/2023 7:08:23 PM PST by anthropocene_x
In early december, I received an electricity bill for 1,400 British pounds ($1,700). It was an absurd overcharge for six months of energy I hadn’t used, in a house I moved out of two years ago. “Oh well,” I said to myself, “it’s just an obvious clerical error.” I assumed the problem would be resolved in an hour, tops.
I was wrong. I called the company seven times. I contacted its WhatsApp support line six times. I sent emails. Each time, someone new responded, restarting the entire process. At one point, I got a text from a subsidiary debt-collection agency threatening my credit rating. Finally, I was notified last week that the mistaken bill had been withdrawn. I had spent more than 20 hours of my life across two months fixing the company’s mistake. The company faced no penalty.
Although my example is drawn from my life in the U.K., I’m from the U.S. originally and I know that virtually all Americans will experience a version of this story.
We tend to simply accept such experiences as a feature of modern life. But we shouldn’t. Good governments should make fixing these everyday failures a priority.
Think income inequality, an extortionate health-care system, and rural decay. Think, too, about the sense many people have that the sources of power—both public and private—are far away and unresponsive.
Whenever we encounter a problem we didn’t create—like my outrageous electricity charge, or hospital-billing errors, or a mix-up at the IRS—all we can do is go online for a customer-service number and cross our fingers tha the call won’t consume the entire day, or worse. When a person coping with cancer treatment spends hours on the phone with her insurance company or Medicaid, she may wonder why her society is so cruel, or so incompetent.
(Excerpt) Read more at vigourtimes.com ...
“At one point, I got a text from a subsidiary debt-collection agency threatening my credit rating.”
Libel?
Blackmail?
There is virtually no large American business from utils to airlines to railroads that aren't allowed to rob and even kill Americans. In the end, shareholders may pay, but the executives will still have their multimillion dollar paychecks larded with cashed stock options.
The elite have no skin in the game: if they make money, it's theirs. If they run a company into the ground or kill or poison people, the rest of us, shareholders and taxpayers, get stuck with the bill.
This guy, as others, claims Trump was authoritarian. How so? Were they only paying attention to what he said, or his tweets? As a leader, he was not authoritarian, and was remarkably ineffectual. He didn’t accomplish much, and just let the Democrats do what they wanted. He did do some executive orders, but far less than Obama, and probably less than Clinton.
I wish my bill was that LOW!!! what the heck is this person complaining about!
Democracy?
Sounds more like a horrible combination of Kakistocracy, Kleptocracy and Bureaupathy to me.
“overcharge for six months of energy I hadn’t used, in a house I moved out of two years ago.”
Sometimes, I think that everything in the world is broken.
About 20 years ago, I moved into a house I’d just bought. It was November and that’s heating season in this area.
I got my first electric bill. $930!
That was obviously an error. I did the math and figured that I would have had to be using something like 20,000 watts of electricity 24 hours a day for a month to run up that kind of bill....and my gas furnace wouldn’t have run at all because that much electric use produces a lot of heat.
I called the electric company (a cooperative) about it twice and got no resolution, so I went to their office and dealt with it in person. They figured out quickly that it was a meter reading error.
They sent me a survey about their service and I mentioned the billing/meter reading problem. They sent me a solar calculator along with a letter apologizing for the problem.
The calculator arrived broken because it was damaged by the post office, but hey, it’s the thought that counts...
And perhaps conglomerates and mega-corps are businesses that are too big to care.
Maybe it is time to break up some of these business or not allow them to merge at all.
Short term pain for long term gain.
I’ve been a doctor since 1976.
In that time, for a variety of reasons, a huge pool of money has been growing - from Federal, state, and local government, and from employers, meant to care for sick people.
In the past ten years, the number of straws drinking from that pool has exploded. Just the facilitation of the Electronic Medical Record has created tens of thousands of jobs. I get solicitations literally every day now for new businesses which have devised new billing scams, new types of office workers, new schemes to get around various regulations AND prospectus after prospectus about whether the future of practice lies with Amazon or CVS.
The whole thing is absurd. I had a procedure recently where my bill showed $9000 for something that wasn’t even done. I called my “insurance” company. “What are you worried about? We paid it”.
The system is on its last legs. Start thinking about what comes next.
Opus?
The original article is from The Atlantic.
TDS is probably a necessary feature to get published there.
Go to nextdoor.com to see the complaints of the huge natural gas increases. Same for electric rates. I am in California.
The price is just made up by the socialists to drive people broke and more dependent of the democrats.
Democracy sucks. A large and overbearing federal government sucks. A small government and local governments are the way to go. You know, federalism. And how our Constitutional Republic is supposed to work.
If you live in California your energy costs are controlled by PGandE
By the democrat party.
Many is the time I’ve felt like yelling at somebody on the phone for a simple mistake that either keeps on happening after discussing it, or is never fixed for a good long time.
I try to remember that it’s not the customer service man’s fault that X,Y or Z happened. They just work there.
I try to unbraid their accent in order to understand them.
I try to remain a respectful grown up with minimal whining or direct accusations.
Nowadays, you can’t even enjoy slamming the phone on somebody, because cell phone calls will end without any sound at all. Maybe there is an APP for slamming phone noises!
What?
Allow mob rule and this is what you get.
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