New levels of fury

This is an old gripe. If you are tired of hearing it from me, believe me, I am equally tired of still being in the position to be making it.

A recap, for those of you who missed the first umpteen iterations of my annoyance, is as follows. My boyfriend and I bought a house two years ago and moved in.

We received our water and electricity bill for the first couple of months that we lived there with no problems. In the third month, our water bill suddenly came to R11 000.

We consulted with a plumber, who assured us there was no underground leak, and that it was pretty impossible, even if we`d left the taps running 24 hours a day since we moved in, to accrue a bill of that magnitude.

So off we went to the council, which acknowledged its mistake, and promised to do its best to sort it out. In the interim, the council said, it would put a freeze on the account, so that our non-payment wouldn`t result in our water being cut off.

No such freeze ever happened, and we continued to be charged interest on the outstanding amount every month. In the meantime, we kept paying our bill with an estimate of what we actually owed.

There was a bit of interim ridiculousness, when it turned out that someone in the council was handing out our account details to a third-party con artist, who tried to get us to pay our outstanding account to him. Another visit to the council saw him reported to its auditors, and although they seemed quite interested initially, we have heard nothing further from them.

There, bold as brass, was a charge for R43 000 worth of electricity.

Georgina Guedes, ITWeb Brainstorm

Eventually, 11 months later, after another two visits to the council, the amount was reversed.

It turned out the council had decided to arbitrarily start billing us as if the meter reading had been "zero" when we moved in, which meant we were being charged for all the water that had ever passed through our pipes since that meter had been installed.

A further rigmarole finally led to the reversal of all the interest we had been charged over the course of the 11 months (not an automatic action when a mistake on the council`s part is acknowledged). We received one bill that was correct, and had a bit of a celebration.

The next month, when the bill arrived, I had a bit of a spring in my step as I walked towards my front door opening it.

There, bold as brass, was a charge for R43 000 worth of electricity.

More visits to the council, calls to the new call centre, whose agents, I may add, have been trained to never acknowledge that it might be a mistake on the part of the council.

I managed to extract from the recalcitrant agent the cost per kilowatt, and with him on the phone explained my opening meter reading and closing meter reading, and came to the obvious conclusion that even if I hadn`t paid my bill the whole time I had lived in my house, I didn`t owe that much for electricity.

It is now a year later. There has still been no change in the bill. I am still being charged interest. I am also of the opinion that the council owes me money, since I have been overpaying for some time now.

The reason I am revisiting this sorry state of affairs, other than to keep you updated on my progress, or lack thereof, is because I saw an article on CNN last week that set my blood boiling.

A woman in America, who received a $78 000 water bill, made front-page news! Front page on CNN for an unreasonable charge on her utilities bill! And not only that, but because the municipality was so embarrassed to have provided her with such an outrageously ridiculous bill, it waived her charge for that month.

Sheesh! Look at that. It willingly admitted it was wrong when confronted with a bill that was so obviously, well, wrong. How`s that for service delivery?

Not only did it immediately resolve the problem, but it also, as a show of good faith, gave her a month`s free water to make up for her woes.

Who, I ask, is going to reimburse me for the endless phone calls and mornings I`ve had to take off work to go and resolve my bill?