I live outside of DC so we have to get gas from Washington Gas.
After the first month we lived here we got a bill from Washington gas for, say, $50. Fine. We pay it.
Just a few days afterward we get a new bill for another $50, which we pay.
The following month our bill comes and it’s stamped with a big red Disconnection Notice and, to paraphrase, “Pay this amount NOW or we’re cutting you off!”
I call them up and ask them what the fuck. I don’t say that, I’m polite about it, and the nice lady I speak with tells me there must have been some sort of glitch in the billing department and the disconnection notice was a mistake, but it’s still a bill and I should pay it.
Not wanting to get disconnected, I pay the $50 and the next month I get the EXACT SAME LETTER, along with A REFUND CHECK FOR $50 THAT I “OVERPAID”!!!
So I call them again and speak with another nice lady and we have basically the same conversation as before.
Then of course the next month, I again receive a bill stamped “Disconnection Notice, pay this amount RIGHT NOW” along with, again, a refund check for the amount I paid last month.
This has been occurring every month this whole year.
Am I ahead $50, or am I behind $50? No one I speak to there can give me an answer.
It might help to go to an actual office if there’s one in town and talk to someone in person.
I once had my electricity cut off because I paid 1 time via the internet and the company decided that was my signal that I wanted to go 100% electronic billing and notices. Since I hadn’t requested that, it didn’t occur to me that they’d eliminate all paper billing after 1 electronic transfer, and their bills went straight into my spam folder and I didn’t see them. About the time I was wondering when I’d get another electric bill (this was right after I had just moved), they turned it off. The disconnect notice was in an email. I switched back to paper billing.
I have People’s Gas in Chicago, and last November they completely forgot to bill me and take the automatic payment that had been set up for two years. I called once I realized the money was still in my account and hadn’t gotten the automatic withdrawal notice. All the csr could say was, yep, looks like it was missed (and the meter was read like it should have been) and you’ll likely get double billed next time.
How are you paying the bill? If you’re paying on line, are you sure that you’re using the right account information? That is, is it possible that your payments are being credited to some other account with a zero balance? This could explain why they are refunding your money while at the same time claiming your account is past due.
We have an auto-pay with our trash company. Trash is billed quarterly (I don’t know why).
Somehow the auto-pay hasn’t gone through for the last three billing cycles even though the bills each say “$xx.xx will be automatically deducted etc”. It had worked prior to the last three cycles. They don’t call or write after the auto-pay doesn’t go through but just stop picking up trash. We call in and get it taken care of. We’ve offered to change the auto-pay or stop it and they always say that there is no need to do it since the auto-pay will take care of it.
Then about 2-4 weeks later, our trash doesn’t get picked up again. Again, no notices. We call in and find out that there is an unpaid service charge on the account when they stopped picking up trash. The first two times, I politely explained that we weren’t going to pay that since the problem was on their end. The third time, I was told that they couldn’t waive the fee again and I told them that I was going to write our (small) city and detail the last three billing cycles. They waived the fee. We’ll see what happens next billing cycle.
We pay by check. I cannot speak to the inner workings of their billing department, but from the anecdotes about this company I’ve gotten back from other people I’ve told this story to, this kind of fuckery does not seem to be an uncommon occurrence for them.
Washington Gas customer here as well. We moved to a new house about 11 years ago - and they put us on the “pay the same amount every month” plan without our asking. OK, whatever… there’s usually a month at the end of the “year” where we pay a bit less or more.
A few years ago though, in the 2009-2010 “year”, they sent us a notice “your monthly bill is 30 dollars”. That was pretty wacky, so I called 'em. They insisted that “oh no, that’s correct based on your usage last year!!”.
Yeah - my last 3 bills of that year were in the 150 dollar range. The prior year, my monthly bills were 95 dollars (the last one was 20 or 30 to make up for a slight overpayment).
At least ten years ago, I set up budget billing with our gas company, so we could pay the same amount every month. They invited me to do so. I very carefully figured the average monthly bill for the previous two years, then added a bit to it, just to make sure it was covered. That worked for a couple of years. Since we had started it in May, there was enough credit in there by the cold months that it all balanced out. Then one year they sent us a refund check for the overage, along about November. Great plan, right? And here I thought the budget billing was so we wouldn’t get hit with bigger bills during part of the year.
Then, they decided to re-evaluate our payment every four months, so in the years since it’s gone from twenty to a hundred dollars and everywhere in between, four months at a time.
I can’t begin to fathom their reasoning.