Well, I heard back from the power company and their response was exactly as I expected. "We are so sorry to hear of your problem . . . but you will have to take it up with your landlord as it is a tenant/landlord issue . . . also, we do not have your address in our database."
What part of "the account is not in my name, it is in the trailer park's name" don't you understand? The whole problem is that I can't get ahold of my landlord, I do not know how or who reads the meters. But it's not their problem, so they can wash their hands of it. In my book that makes them accomplices in exploiting the poor. They have no interest in changing things, why should they?
I find this attitude particularly frustrating because I work with numbers all day long. Giant, enormous spreadsheets of data, dozens of columns wide and thousands of rows down. And those numbers HAVE to be accurate! Not only does our company's reputation depend on it, so do lives. Your lives and mine. The numbers I deliver are what the FDA and other regulatory bodies around the world use in making their decisions on what drugs and devices to approve. So you better believe I have NO TOLERANCE for slipshod accounting.
Because numbers are so critical to what we do, all work is first peer reviewed in a process called QC or Quality Checking. From there, it goes to the Quality Assurance Department for further review. In addition, we have been taught how to spot fraud. We are encouraged, unlike the people at the power company, or my landlord's office, to look for things that don't look right and QUESTION THEM. Thankfully, outright fraud in my business is rare.
For example, if I am looking over a rat body weight table and I notice the first rat weighs 325 grams and the second rat in a group weighs 326 grams, that's entirely reasonable. But if the third rat weighs 327 and the fourth rat weighs 328, on down to the last rat in the group being precisely one gram more than the previous, that is cause for me to pick up the phone and say, hey, what is going on down there in the weighing room? Is someone actually weighing these rats or are they just entering numbers? Sure, it could happen that way that each rat is precisely one gram more than the one before, but it is statistically not likely.
What is more common, and this is more relevant to my situation, is that someone has simply entered the wrong number. Say you get a rat whose body weight has hovered around 325 grams for several weeks then all of a sudden shoots up to over a kilogram of weight. Then the next week back around 325. Again, that is reason to pick up the phone or send an email saying please check into this, this doesn't look right. What will happen then is this value will be excluded from whatever statistics are being run, because you can't go back in and enter the correct value because at this point you don't know what the original weight was. That would be falsifying data--and a BIG no-no. Companies have been shut down for that.
With regards to my electric bill, it has consistently hovered around the 120 KWH/month mark up until last month when it shot up to over 1200 KWH. If this was a rat's body weight we were talking about--well, it'd be questioned, as I said. But apparently there is no such accountability when it comes to the power company (or my landlord). They just take down the numbers, and send out the bill. I have a feeling that questioning is not encouraged, that a naive employee who went to his or her boss with "this doesn't look right on this person's account" would find themselves being told "just do your job, it's not your job to look into these things." If a number got transposed or an extra zero added, well, that's just too bad for the consumer. And if the consumer has no recourse in these matters, well, sucks to be you.
It is this climate of indifference that allows these kinds of things to go on. But it's easier to fight for gun rights or reproductive rights, than to battle an entire system. It's like my neighbors, choosing to go after the absentee manager because of an alleged sex offender record, than to do the real work of fighting exploitation.
What part of "the account is not in my name, it is in the trailer park's name" don't you understand? The whole problem is that I can't get ahold of my landlord, I do not know how or who reads the meters. But it's not their problem, so they can wash their hands of it. In my book that makes them accomplices in exploiting the poor. They have no interest in changing things, why should they?
I find this attitude particularly frustrating because I work with numbers all day long. Giant, enormous spreadsheets of data, dozens of columns wide and thousands of rows down. And those numbers HAVE to be accurate! Not only does our company's reputation depend on it, so do lives. Your lives and mine. The numbers I deliver are what the FDA and other regulatory bodies around the world use in making their decisions on what drugs and devices to approve. So you better believe I have NO TOLERANCE for slipshod accounting.
Because numbers are so critical to what we do, all work is first peer reviewed in a process called QC or Quality Checking. From there, it goes to the Quality Assurance Department for further review. In addition, we have been taught how to spot fraud. We are encouraged, unlike the people at the power company, or my landlord's office, to look for things that don't look right and QUESTION THEM. Thankfully, outright fraud in my business is rare.
For example, if I am looking over a rat body weight table and I notice the first rat weighs 325 grams and the second rat in a group weighs 326 grams, that's entirely reasonable. But if the third rat weighs 327 and the fourth rat weighs 328, on down to the last rat in the group being precisely one gram more than the previous, that is cause for me to pick up the phone and say, hey, what is going on down there in the weighing room? Is someone actually weighing these rats or are they just entering numbers? Sure, it could happen that way that each rat is precisely one gram more than the one before, but it is statistically not likely.
What is more common, and this is more relevant to my situation, is that someone has simply entered the wrong number. Say you get a rat whose body weight has hovered around 325 grams for several weeks then all of a sudden shoots up to over a kilogram of weight. Then the next week back around 325. Again, that is reason to pick up the phone or send an email saying please check into this, this doesn't look right. What will happen then is this value will be excluded from whatever statistics are being run, because you can't go back in and enter the correct value because at this point you don't know what the original weight was. That would be falsifying data--and a BIG no-no. Companies have been shut down for that.
With regards to my electric bill, it has consistently hovered around the 120 KWH/month mark up until last month when it shot up to over 1200 KWH. If this was a rat's body weight we were talking about--well, it'd be questioned, as I said. But apparently there is no such accountability when it comes to the power company (or my landlord). They just take down the numbers, and send out the bill. I have a feeling that questioning is not encouraged, that a naive employee who went to his or her boss with "this doesn't look right on this person's account" would find themselves being told "just do your job, it's not your job to look into these things." If a number got transposed or an extra zero added, well, that's just too bad for the consumer. And if the consumer has no recourse in these matters, well, sucks to be you.
It is this climate of indifference that allows these kinds of things to go on. But it's easier to fight for gun rights or reproductive rights, than to battle an entire system. It's like my neighbors, choosing to go after the absentee manager because of an alleged sex offender record, than to do the real work of fighting exploitation.
