Who turned out all the lights?
We’ve never even paid a third of that even in the heat of summer. I called up Edison to find out what the deal was, and to my surprise the lady on the phone said that it was the charge for my “second location.” What?! Okay, so I am planning on moving into a new apartment in less than a month and I did set up a request to switch my service over to that new unit but how did I get charged so much already, before I even moved in? Apparently my service request to switch service locations was to start new service on July 15th, the day after I scheduled the request that was supposed to take place on August 13th. Whoops!
Strangely, there was apparently nothing in Edison’s systems that shows my request was made to start service on August 13th. She assured me that I requested the service start on July 15th, which I didn’t. I’ve been planning ahead for the move with everything I can, scheduling the Postal Service forwarding, scheduling my Time Warner Cable service move, and planning to have my electricity switched over on the move-in date as well… or so I thought… apparently.
Then I remembered that Edison sent me an email confirming the requested start date for my new service. I still had it, thankfully, and I have to write and fax a letter to Edison containing a copy of the email to prove to them that it was them that screwed up, not me. I guess I’m really just not nice enough to pay the electricity bill for our soon-to-be new apartment, no matter how eager I am to make it ours.
While it wasn’t the biggest inconvenience in the world, I do find it mildly annoying that I have to write a letter and print it out along with my email and then fax it to Edison to prove to them that I’m not stupid. Couldn’t they have just looked up the confirmation number that I was given? Nope. I guess it wasn’t really confirming anything at all, since it got set up so early. It would be slightly more understandable if they had somehow backdated the change to July 13th (the day before I submitted the service change request) but instead they somehow misinterpreted 08/13/2009 as “tomorrow.”
On top of that, she didn’t even offer the stop the bill for me so that $178.47 more than what my bill was for wasn’t taken out of my bank account due to their mistake. Glad I remembered to ask. I guess I shouldn’t have expected much from them, though. A couple of years ago they continued to bill my WaMu account for months after I switched the billing to a new bank account and completely removed the WaMu one from their system. I had to deal with getting overdraft charges waived (since I moved all of my money out of WaMu) for an error on Edison’s end. The representative I spoke to at the time even confirmed that they had no record of my WaMu account being in their system and there was no way they could still be charging it. Amazing. Let’s hope they can figure this one out.
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