bills and customer service, are we being robbed?

[Clodfobble]

We had a nightmare getting the electric bill sorted out right when we moved in, because of meter location problems.

The previous owner had created an enclosed porch at the back of the house, which surrounded the electric meter, blocking access to it. No problem, our city has a read-it-yourself program for people with vicious dogs, etc., where you just turn the dials on a little card to match the meter and put it out on the fence for the meter man to see. If you forget to put your card out, policy is that they way over-estimate the usage--that is, add a huge number to whatever you had last month--and then you get a very low bill the next month, when you put the real reading out like you're supposed to.

The first month we moved in, we didn't know about the card. So our first reading was one of those crazy-high estimates. Only the reading itself wasn't out-of-line with what the dials actually said. Logically, this meant the previous reading they were "adding" to was incorrectly low: i.e., the previous owner was cheating on their numbers, lying to get lower bills. However, this situation was complicated enough that it was completely over the head of every customer service rep at the phone company, especially when they were all programmed to assume I was complaining because the bill was so high, and they kept trying to explain to me how their over-estimating policy worked. I literally had to call 3 or 4 times in a row, every day for two weeks, until I had talked to every single customer service rep, and they all agreed together to forward my complaint to their boss just to get me off their backs. Fortunately he was smart enough to get it, and fixed the bill.