Sorry about that, I think you got my heating oil bill from last year. It wasn’t an error.
Our recalculations bring it to just over $146. Now to draft the letter to include with the check.
Heh. My flatmate worked on a project for one of the UK utility companies a few years back. She was leading a team of about half a dozen people who did nothing but write mainframe to do what you describe - they spent about four months on that project, and everything they built was added over the top of about decade’s worth of accumulated COBOL that attempted to sanity check the bills. It still wasn’t great at the end, but when you have a rickety twenty-year-old mainframe billing system and a few million customers, it is apparently quite difficult to catch all the things that can go wrong. And when you have several hundred thousand possible exceptions, routing them for a human to look at is a desperately expensive exercise.
I seem to recall the best-ever anecdote was a widow in her eighties in a small bungalow who received a quarterly electricity bill well into six figures (pounds sterling). Niiiice.
Oh, one addendum, I am sending the estimated amount due in a money order. I know from experience that checks for bills in an amount other than the amount on the bill often get cashed for the amount on the bill anyway.
Oooh Oooh - I have one! We were living in Michigan in a duplex - we got our monthly gas bill (ususally about $100) - only this time it was for $2,500. Wow. That hurts. So of course I went to read the meter and recalculated what it should have been. They must have mis-read the 1,000 - place, because my calculations were close to the normal amount. So I called them to report the mistake. Sure, the lady said, she’ll fix it - and go ahead and send in the normal amount.
OK - so I did. Next month… $2,500 bill!! Again! OK. I call and tell them AGAIN, and send in regular payment as read from the meter. So finally next month they send an actual person to read the meter. The next bill? What bill? They sent me a CHECK for $2,500!! Cha-Ching! Must have corrected the mistake - twice!
OK, so I did NOT cash it. But I REALLY wanted to… we moved shortly after and I don’t know if they ever figured it out.
When I moved out here I was paying a relatively high water and sewer bill. I lived in a two-bedroom apartment by myself and I was paying close to $60/month. Since I’d never lived in this area before, I kind of shrugged my shoulders and paid it.
About a year later, some co-workers and I were talking about bills. I mentioned my water bill and how much more it was than I expected it to be. Everyone else was surprised too. Some of them were living in the same town, in big houses with wives and kids and their water bill still wasn’t that high. They suggested that I go to the town hall to get it straightened out. When I did, they asked me to check my meter with the last bill. I did, and the numbers matched. They shrugged their shoulders and said, well, sorry. Another year passed.
So I was paying yet another $180-for-three-months bill at the town hall. The clerk looked at the bill and said, wow, that’s the highest bill I’ve ever seen. Is there a leak at your place? No, not that I’m aware of, I said. I’d just had maintenance over and they never saw any problems. The clerk wondered if I was using a lot of water. Well, it was just me and I didn’t think I was doing any industrial washing, or taking ten-hour showers. The clerk decided to send a reader over.
Well, the reader looked and looked and looked at the meter. He went to the sink and turned on the water for a while. He frowned at it, tinkered at it for a while with some tools. Finally, he had an answer.
I was being metered for all four apartments in my block.
Holy cow! How did they straighten that one out?
I had a similar thing happen, although at a much smaller scale. It turned out that we were paying to heat the water for another apartment as well as our own. Our landlady let us stay one month free and use the security deposit for the last month’s rent. Since the rent was $185 a month, this seemed like it was fair. We had also kept the place up well while we were there and even restored the brick sidewalk in the front of the house using bricks from an overgrown patio in back yard, making the walking path much safer. The month of free rent came at a time when we very much needed it.