I truly do.
Sunday always is a good day to sit down, organize the week’s mail, shuffle through the bills and – if there is any money left – pay some of them. There were the regular credit card statements, the little water bill and, of course, the electric bill.
What an interesting little monster that one is. I live in an all-electric house, so I don’t have a separate gas bill or anything other than electric that appears on my monthly bill from Appalachian Power. Why then, do I have a two page statement?
There is, of course, last month’s balance minus the payment they received leaving me at zero. AP then adds a fee for generation services. What – pray tell – are generation services? That must be the cost of providing my actual electrical current. I didn’t think I used that much electric last month, but really its a pretty small amount, so I’m cool with that. I don’t know if the power comes from a nuclear plant or a hydroelectric plant, but someone has to pay for it, so that fee is fine. Oops, there are more lines.
Next line: fuel factor. Ah, so AP needs to use a multiplication factor to surcharge my electric bill. Interesting. I’d like to be able to do that when I send out my bills. When did I agree to allow them to multiply my bill times anything? Where did that multiplier come from? Are there smaller ones that I can choose from? I wonder if I could apply a subtraction factor when I pay the bill — seems fair to me. After all, it takes time, energy and postage to send them my payment.
Next line: transmission services. So, I pay to make the electric, then I pay a multiplier to bump up the cost of making the electric. Now I have to pay to transmit the electric across the lines that never stay on the poles during the lightest of rain storms. I wish they’d use some of these transmission service fees to upgrade the wires and poles in this town. It’s not a big figure, so I’ll let this one slide. Plus, maybe they do use it to put up new wires every now and then.
Next up is distribution services. Hmmm, now that one really stumps me. I just paid for transmission, now I’m paying for distribution. Am I being double billed here? Weird part is the distribution services are four times higher then the transmission services. I guess someone else needed to get a cut of my electric bill too. Oh wait, maybe the transmission services is the fee to get the electric from the power generator to the lines and the distribution services fee is to get the power from the first part of the line to the meter on my house. Wait…doesn’t electric move at the speed of light? Seems kind of expensive to me.
Then we get to the good part. I always love looking at the taxes that get charged to us. The cell phone bill is my favorite, because I think we’re paying every entity in the country with each bill. But, the power bill is a good one too. There is the good ole’ Virginia Electric Consumption Tax – of course I’d want to pay a tax for using the electric. Then there’s the Local Consumers Tax – a personal favorite of mine. If they are going to create taxes, I like when lawmakers are bold enough to do with for no reason and have to moral obligation to explain it to the entire population who has to pay it. This one is probably because some local government entity had a budget shortfall and thinks we need to shoot them a few bucks every month. Besides, that tax sounds kinda cool, so I’ll let that one slide too.
I look at the bill in total amazement — and quietly reach over and turned off my desk lamp. Maybe I’ll read the rest of my mail using the light from my computer monitor. I pay too much for electric already.