Monday 23 January 2012

Logic is a Greek word......

Well I am on the warpath about water bills again!  Let me explain.

Last year (2011) on March 25 a couple of men turned up to replace my water  meter.  Strange I thought, there's nothing wrong with the old one, and 25th March here is a national holiday (Greek Independence Day) so I made a challenge. The response was unexpected....."We're Albanian we don't give a @%$& about Independence Day, we have to change the meter."  They later demanded 35 Euro for the job, needless to say they did not get it and they were told I would deal with the local authority offices in time.
Prior to them leaving I made a note of the reading of the old meter (the new meter was zero)

The end of years water bill appeared late December, and on viewing it I found the usage to be 603 cubic meters (ie 603000 litres) the reading being dated at the end of September. This meant I had used 22,333 litres PER WEEK !  That  is  without the usage being added of that recorded on the old meter. Think about it that is 133 litres PER HOUR every hour.........totally impossible in our house.

So off to the water company........their answer was two fold.

1) The official called an assistant into the office who allegedly made the bills up and started shouting at him about his complete incompetence.  The individual was (to put it kindly) probably slightly lacking in intelligence, mostly deaf and as I found out on a sort of work experience trial.

It was leading to a kind of "Basil Fawlty" sketch (UK people will understand), I had to stop that and made it clear to the senior official I held him responsible not the junior.

At this point excuse number two came out........

2) Oh, the figure in the reading box is not really the reading its what we think you used and its for all of 2010 and part of 2011....well that will work out to be 6626 litres per week (mmmm possible), and I had to agree we had not had a 2010 bill.

Do I believe any of this when my meter reading was really 730 when I looked in December......I don't think so.  Next years bill will be more than interesting.

Meanwhile one must ask  "Why fit a new meter and still estimate usage?"

Logic may be a Greek word, but it appears not currently practiced here!