Thought this was gunna happen. Yesterday the City’s water department sent me a second bill for this month, bringing the total hit to $214.
Cute.
Earlier this month I learned that someone had turned off the water service to my house and restarted it in their name. The CSR at the water dept thought I was a new tenant in the house. I explained that I’ve lived here for five years and have no intention of moving soon. She said they’d fix it.
So last week along came a bill for $130. That’s about normal: though it’s the highest bill I’ve ever had in this house, it’s only five bucks more than last July’s, and the water rates have gone up twice over the past year. Yesterday—Saturday, of course, when no one’s in their business office—I got a bill on a different account number with the same read date, dinging me for another $87.34!!!
The $130 bill is unitemized: where it’s supposed to list the number of gallons used this month and last month, it says “0.” The $87 bill shows I used 2992 gallons, about 15 percent of the normal amount for the dead of summer.
I suspect they’ve added the “someone’s” water bill to my normal bill.
Happy day. Now I get to spend half of Monday morning doing battle with those people, and probably getting nowhere. If they give me any guff, I’m calling the state AG’s office and reporting that someone stole my identity to get free water.
The water bill is normally astronomical at this time of year. We’ve had day after day of 115- to 118-degree weather. Every plant in the yard has to be watered every single day, and some potted plants have to be watered twice in a day to be kept alive. I’m determined to see the butternut squash through the summer: it has some tiny baby squash, and if it survives, we may get some fall produce from it.
The tomato plants are still alive, but their fruit literally cooks on the vine. The three vine-ripened tomatoes I’ve salvaged have tasted sweet but the pulp is strangely dry: unjuicy tomatoes. La Bethulia was right that chard will live in the heat…but it’s very, very unhappy stuff. The basil and the thyme are OK. Everything else is suffering terribly.
I could have bought a year’s worth of fancy vegetables at Whole Foods for what the water company is charging me this month!
Image: Matthew Bowden, Wikipedia Commons
My goodness. And I thought Florida was bad. I can’t imagine what the plants are feeling in that kind of heat.
@ Wojciech: Hevvin help us! Let’s hope plants aren’t especially sentient. It’s 9:13 p.m. as I scribble this; the temp in the back yard has cooled to an even 100 degrees.