Many years ago during the height of my days at Bankers Trust (late 1980s, I think), our then Chairman, Charlie Sanford (rest his soul) got on a kick of predicting the future and wrote an paper that he presented at a gathering at the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank. The paper was titled Quantum Finance, and it was a prediction that our consumer financial system would evolve into a complex kluge of payment processing where currency would cease to be used on a day-to-day basis and that it would all be replaced by a debit and credit system of micro-fees that would flow around the world through and around all of our accounts. It’s been interesting to me to see that this prediction has more or less come to pass. I know that I am not alone in feeling the need to go over my monthly accounts so that I can stay in touch with all the micro-fees that hit my account at any particular time. I even have a service (Rocket Money) which tracks all that for me and also tracks my subscriptions so that I know which are renewing automatically and whether they are going up or staying the same. None of this is news to any of you since I imagine this is a process everyone must go through these delays thanks to this quantum finance phenomenon.
The other phenomenon that we are all accustomed to these days is that we rarely see a paper bill anymore. Almost all of us are on a paperless basis, so we get our bills online, most often connected to an app for the service provider. I spent a long time when I moved to this hilltop getting my electric system under control with the big investment I made in solar and batteries. I feel like I have reigned in that expense beast quite well at this point and have the online capability to track the kind of renewable energy I am generating and the way in which that fits into my overall grid purchases and usage. It’s all a bit complicated, but Ifeel I can more or less track it all. I am not particularly happy that SDG&E pays me so little for my solar generated electricity, so I am happy that I have two Tesla batteries to capture a lot of that and then use it during the peak hours of do a good job of offsetting my most expensive electricity purchases. Just the other day I got a mid-month update and was told by SDG&E that they expected my current month bill to be $3. That had a nice ring to it.
I recently had an offer from SDG&E to participate in a surge purchase program that would allow SDG&E to tap my batteries up to 35 times during the summer season. They offered me up to $350 per season per battery, so a total of $700. I agreed to it, but then started wondering it this was going to be a case of getting paid $700 only to find that my batteries are getting drained such that they are not available to offset that expensive evening peak usage. I’m wondering if I will be able to reconcile how much that $700 savings is going to cost me. Naturally, I am not expecting too much from SDG&E in terms of program analysis and transparency.
The next utility system I have tried to wrestle to the mat is the water system. That seems far less institutionalized as the Valley Center Municipal Water District does not feel as monolithic as SDG&E. I also have an app from those folks and it give me access to both billing and usage information. I can track my usage month to month and see my billing and payment history. It’s pretty basic and doesn’t do much diagnostically other than to allow me to compare one time period with another in terms of usage and cost. The few times I have had an issue has been when my sap has sprung a leak (technically a stuck overflow valve that ran continuously). In that instance I was able to call the Water District office and have them send me an hour-by-hour report of usage and I could tell when and where the leak was getting generated. It actually allowed me to fix the problem, or at least identify the problem so it could be fixed.
And then there is my propane gas system. This is the source of my current struggle. A few weeks ago we had a gas leak and went through the rigamarole of getting that resolved. The term “rigamarole” (sometimes spelled “rigmarole”) refers to a complex, time-consuming procedure or process that seems unnecessary and confusing. It’s often used to describe excessive bureaucracy, overly complicated instructions, or any unnecessarily convoluted sequence of steps that feels like a waste of time. The word typically carries a negative connotation, suggesting frustration with needless complexity. Well, that is a perfect description of what I had to go through this morning.
My propane provider has me on a monthly billing system to even out the payments. Nonetheless, they send me an invoice whenever they deliver or do service. I dutifully pay that invoice in order not to have a big backlog of billing accumulated. I had to pay $503 just for their technician to come and tell me we had a minor gas leak that needed to be fixed. I paid that service bill right when it was sent to me. I was also so frustrated with the service experience that I turned off all automatic gas deliveries and the autopay functionality on the account. I am waiting for the gas level to drop below 20% so I can replace my provider and get a new tank installed. Today, I received a billing notice from them saying that I owed them $707, even though I had no idea what the source of that balance was all about. So, I went to the online app to see all my billing activity. What I got was a convoluted system that did not comport with the invoice they sent to me. It also did not agree with the verbal balance indicated on their voice system. I called their billing department and was given, yet again, another balance number. That meant that in the span of 20 minutes I was provided through various vehicles, four different account balance numbers and one more to boot based on my own reconciliation (as best I could manage) from the billing information given me on their app. This was crazy. I went through three representatives (one supposedly a supervisor) who all had different explanations of the discrepancies. It was at that point that out of frustration I asked that they terminate my billing plan system and my autopay, since I did not want more charges applies to my account until I had agreed on a full reconciliation with them.
Strangely enough, that cancellation triggered a realization. It seems that the propane company keeps two sets of books on accounts like mine. They have the normal billing and payment system and then they have their monthly level plan billing system. And here’s the ridiculous part…the two don’t communicate with one another even though the two relate to the same account and client. At the end of the day, it turned out I owed them $707 and yet had a credit of $921 on the monthly plan. That netted out to them owing me $214. Naturally, none of that was obvious when they sent me the $707 bill this morning until I spent an hour wrangling over this all with them. We are, indeed, living in the era of quantum finance, but bad bookkeeping has, unfortunately, not died in the meantime.