My local electrical utility ; Toronto Hydro, recently replaced my old electricity meter with a new "Smart" meter and then back-billed my account for the incredibly disturbing sum of $7,627.67 .
See attached bills.
I am in my late 50s, so needless to say, i was not thrilled with the idea of suddenly having to come up with almost $7700 for a pathologically indifferent service provider that i already had a very low opinion of. They have over-billed and under-billed my account with a combination of estimated + actual readings for the past 15 years to the point where it is totally impossible to determine whether accurate or not, and they accept no responsibility whatsoever for their years of inaccurate billing.
I have cursed more times since receiving this bill than in my previous thirty years, but i am now resolved that if Toronto Hydro wants to back-bill me for $7,700, i will not rest until i give them $7,700 of bad PR in return. They should not be able to do this. This should be illegal or at least capped to within 10-20% of the estimated billing.
I was only the only resident during the period, the property is empty mon-fri during the day and there is virtually nothing on during the summer save for a few standard appliances and some lights. How they could under-bill by $7700 over that period is beyond me. Unbelievable.
Please email your local Councillor and/or MPP and let them know that back-billing is unacceptable in this day and age and needs to be stopped. Only a monopoly like Toronto Hydro could get away with sub-standard business practices like this.
In any event, I have now gotten over the initial shock somewhat and as an amateur photographer with some long-standing professional aspirations, I have decided to try and make "Lemonade from Lemons" as the saying goes and try to use this as an opportunity to show some of my pictures and shamelessly try to get some consideration for Scotiabank's yearly photographic award. Are you out there Scotiabank ?
So please stick around and have a look and let me know what you think.
The first 5 photos pretty well sum up my feelings about the whole situation.
and please check out my Toronto-centric photo-blog ; Toronto Zeitgeist
http://torontozeitgeist.blogspot.com/
Thanks and Regards,
Douglas Colling
Toronto, Canada
douglascolling@rogers.com
And some random images :
