I’m just name dropping is all.
Personally I prefer the image of Roy, Moss, and Jen (from The IT Crowd) lying in hammocks on a beach in Thailand, sipping cocktails from coconuts with umbrellas and fruit garnish, watching the monkeys scamper playfully away from the tigers roaming about. I’m sure you’ll agree that’s a far better mental image than an IT department located in an office in regional Victoria. 
Is that because you have to put your husband on the account? My mom always wound up putting her name on everything because my dad is horrible on the phone.
I’ve avoided going paperless because I work for the USPS. 
nevermind
I avoid going paperless because my father is the Once-ler.
Because when left to my own resources, I forget to pay it, and it ends up costing me in late fees. I’m usually very intelligent with money, but for some reason, I…just…can’t…pay bills on time. So I let the company do it for me.
You know who else can’t remember to pay bills on time?
Pansies
Off to financial boot camp for you!
Yeah, right. Who was vice president? Jerry Lewis?
No shit. But they cheerfully accept payment out of an account that has only MY name on it. Fuckers.
Ours is.
And in our house the bills come in my husband’s name. He has to add me to the account for me to talk to them (and I do all the bills). And sometimes when he adds me it works and then I can talk to them, but mostly when he adds me the next time I call I’m told I’m not “authorized” and the nonsense starts again.
(Bills are in his name because I was a single woman who lived alone and had a bad stalking experience before I married. I don’t want a female name on my mail).
So change your name to Fred.
ETA: 
Same here. But the alternative is to set up bill payment from your own bank account instead of leaving the control with the company. The point is to keep the control in your hands, so when you cancel service, the company can’t just keep accessing your account.
Can’t you cancel a deduction in the US? In Germany that’s no problem at all, and you get the money back.
I could just go by my own unisex diminutive. But at this point his name has been on the bills for over 15 years, and before the whole privacy act, it wasn’t an issue. And if they can’t add me, I’m not sure how I’d manage to get them to change the bills into my name.
Could you talk to somebody? I went paperless because there is only an 80% chance that anything mailed to me actually gets delivered. Unless it’s junk mail. That they manage to deliver by the cartload.
I don’t have anything as elaborate as a spreadsheet, but I know all the bills I pay per month and when they are due. Every bill I pay arrives by mid month. If I didn’t get a bill for some reason, I’d just call the company and ask what I owed. It’s being financially responsible!
This is true. It’s dumb, but true. My wife’s name is on our phone bill, she moved into our house before we got married and set up all the utilities, so they are all in her name. And I never have a problem talking to them, because I’m the husband. But lord knows how many times I watched my mom tell my dad he had to call someone or other, because they didn’t consider her to be authorized on the account.
I understand their reasoning (don’t want a bitter ex-wife calling up and cancelling her ex-husband’s cable, now do we?), but still, there’s got to be a better way than no wife can ever do anything on the family utility accounts without her husband putting a notarized letter on the account or something. When we moved, Jim added my name to all the accounts, but I have a feeling that I’m still going to run into trouble next time I need to call up and talk to someone, judging from how excellently they changed our address (into gibberish).
Apparently it’s OK for me to cancel all my wife’s stuff, though…and we don’t even have the same last name. As long as I can confirm the acct number and the billing address (which I could get by stealing her mail) I get to make whatever changes I want.