Who is paying the electric bill? Man finds out he has been paying the wrong bill for 18 years

There was a little scam that people I know would attempt to do every now and then when the electricity bills would arrive in the little thing that is attached to the side of people's mailboxes. They would swap their bill with someone else's and every now and then the person would simply pay it without even looking at it. This worked for a lot of people and the person whose bill was paid by someone else would have plausible deniability by claiming that they didn't put it there and perhaps the utility company are the ones who made the mistake.

This is something that I have almost done by accident in the past as well because someone pulled the trick on me. I was already in line to pay at one of those scanner things that have turned us all into automatons and I was just going to pay it without even looking at it. I figured it out at the last minute and didn't pay it in the end. It's actually quite easy where I live to just pay your electric bill online and that is what I do all the time now anyway.

However, in a strange story in California, a man has found out that for nearly 2 decades, he has been paying the electric bill for the wrong residence.

In this particular situation, there was nothing nefarious going on but the wiring for his apartment complex actually had the meters mislabeled and it was only after a concerned and astute resident turned off all of his power and went out to check the meter that he saw that the little wheel was still spinning even though he switched off the main breaker to his entire unit.

src

You likely have something like this attached to your residence as well because even though all things seem to be digital these days, the technology for measuring electrical use hasn't changed much in our lifetimes. There is not good reason to update it from analog so they just keep it that way, which makes sense because don't fix what isn't broken, right?

Well this one instance of the meters being mislabeled was only discovered because this one resident got a rather large electric bill after he had made a life change to try to use a lot less electricity in his life... only to have the electric bill arrive larger than it normally would be.

This leads me to think about my own apartment building and how we kind of just give the electric company as well as the owner of the building the benefit of the doubt as to whether or not they are labeled correctly. We just assume they are right, yeah? I mean, what the hell do I know about how much energy costs? It's just one of those things that you have to pay no matter what.

So an audit of some sort - I'm not going to go into details because I don't care enough - revealed that there is some suspicion that something like 10% of all meters are mislabeled because well, I guess because it is one of those "that isn't my job" sort of things that just kind of happens.

So therefore I encourage you to do what this man did on your own one day. Locate your meter, then turn off the main breaker in your house and return to the meter and see if it is still moving. There might be a slight trickle of electricity due to power loss which is normal between the meter and your unit, but it should be barely moving.

The power company is one of those industries that really has us by the throat because we don't have any other choice but to use their services. They have no competition and therefore, they don't really have to feel compelled to have a great deal of quality control. In this one man's situation the power company said "soowwwee" and then said they would work on correcting the problem on the next billing cycle. Thanks a lot!

I feature this guy not because he is dumb, the system is dumb. We need people like him that are going to cross check these monopolies because they don't have any incentive to give us quality on their own.