Doug vs. the interweb

July 18th, 2010 12:46 AM

I finally took the time to determine, based on ranges, what other types of frogs I might find around this area, because obviously it'd be neat to find some different kinds. The answer was somewhat unsettling! In this area, there are bullfrogs, green frogs, wood frogs, pickerel frogs, and spring peepers. That's pretty much it. I've caught them all and there really aren't any left to be surprised by. There are a few miscellaneous tree frogs in areas that would be somewhat nearby, but tree frogs are kind of boring, and much harder to find!

So that's a pretty light-hearted introduction for what is bound to be a fairly unpleasant entry. That's how it goes. There was a death in an old friend's family last week, and I was originally planning on coming back home for the weekend to get back in touch with him. But then on Wednesday, I got an extraordinarily unsettling phone call concerning my electric bill. Of course, I don't want to belittle someone else's real problems by pretending my own financial issues might be worse, but it's still an exceptionally strange situation.

Basically, my landlord informed me that they were still paying the electric bill for my apartment and could I please do something about that. My first response was what the hell I have been paying a dang PECO bill every month, but of course before I could complete such a sentence, various details started to coalesce in my mind.

At the end of February, last year, I moved from an apartment on Township Line Road, to this one here at Claremont Apartments. It was a sudden move, somewhat chaotic, and I believe I may have mentioned it before. After the move, I informed PECO of my change of address. Shortly after, I started receiving bills from them, as would be expected.

However, the bills were addressed to the Township Line Road address, and made it to me since I had set up mail forwarding. This certainly didn't make sense, so I called them and asked about it, informing them of my new address. Sometime after that, my bills showed up addressed to the Claremont address, and I considered the matter closed.

Of course, at some point between then and now I noticed that although the address on the envelope is pointed at Claremont, the service address listed on the bill still was the old Township Line address. Having already made it clear to them twice, I figured this was just a holdover from changing addresses so often (after all, I had moved from Norristown to the last place less then a year before that). After all, it's not like they would change the mailing address of a regular, residential customer without changing the service address. It would seem the most prevalent case for normal folks is to pay for the address at which they live, and if there actually was a discrepancy, they would've said something when I had called them last.

After all, if I was still paying for the old address, that would mean I wasn't paying for the new address, and there's no way the Claremont office would let it go over a year like that. Also, at the previous place I lived, the owner seemed to be really on top of keeping track of whose name was on the electric bill; surely there was some common, accepted method for switching an apartment back to the owner when the tenant left.

And so obviously, these fairly acceptable assumptions turned out to be completely incorrect.

• I informed PECO I was moving. I don't remember precisely how, it could've been a phone call or through their web site, but it's been a year and a half and I don't remember. This had no noticeable effect.
• I called PECO later and gave them my new address. All this did was change the billing address. Being a regular, residential customer, in my tiny little brain I equated the concepts of billing address and service address. How silly of me. Maybe I said the wrong thing on the phone?
• The bill was never relinquished back to the owner. I don't sublet property so I don't have any idea how this normally works, but I'd imagine there's some means of transferring ownership of the bill back to the landlord, and that doesn't seem like a right that would be granted to the tenant. I mean, whenever I move into a place, the bill always starts out owned by the landlord, and I am responsible for putting my name on it. It doesn't start out in the previous tenant's name.
• Whoever owns Claremont (The Hankin Group?) had ownership of this current apartment's bill. I would've thought they would have been all over me if even a single month passed without PECO informing them it had been transferred to me. That never happened. It has been been seventeen months.

The lady from Claremont who informed me of this problem seemed very nice, and willing to help me however was needed to get it all resolved. She said she needed to give a call to another, higher up person, and when she got back to me, her tone seemed a lot less... optimistic. She basically said that it was now between PECO and myself, and that Claremont would simply be giving me a bill for the entire amount they had paid. She did say that I could pay it off in installments if I needed to -- which I certainly would need to. She also informed me that if my name wasn't put on the bill immediately, my power was going to be shut off on Saturday. Luckily, my previous call with PECO had already set that up (after a lengthy discussion to try to figure out just what the hell was going on).

Of course, with the level of incompetence going around (and I don't fully absolve myself from some of that), and with my complete inability to take a single thing for granted anymore (my seemingly natural assumptions were completely false), I decided it would be best to stay here and make sure the goddamned power stayed on.

It's 20 minutes into Sunday so I guess it did.

Now I just need to wait for PECO to finish their investigation into the matter.