I am a single mom trying to raise two kids of my own and 1 other who is living with me until she graduates high school since she has no other place to go. I am not on welfare I pay my bills through hard earned money I make myself by working from home 24/7 I havent had a full nights sleep in a very long time.
I have had plenty of problems with the utility companies over charging me, and paying it anyway since I have no choice or I will lose my services.
Sometimes I pay my bills a bit late but always pay them. These past few weeks have been insane for me with my checking accounts since I am now trying to save money by closing my business doors and putting everything into my own name I have had to close accounts and so on. Well I paid my last months water bill and thought it had cleared my bank. As far as I can tell it did. But today I woke up and turned on my dishwasher as usual only to realize it was running dry. No water.
Since I dropped off another payment to the water company a few days ago and have not heard from them I figured there was an outage or someone was working on the lines. So I waited a couple hours for the water to come back on. Finally I called to report an outage only to hear the tech say "this is strange" he said I was scheduled for shut off on the 29th (21 days from today), I informed him that my bills were paid and he said "I see that" but since my water has been turned off I was transferred to billing.
The first lady I spoke to said that my check I wrote a couple of weeks ago for last months bill has bounced and my recent payment I made via check has been mailed back to me. So I asked why wasent I informed so this shut off wouldent have happened. She responded that I was informed that a letter was sent out today! Well hmmm I thought. How could I have taken care of this if the letter was sent out on the same day I was shut off. This lady told me that I ow a total of $261 this includes 2 months of water and fee's.
I admittadly in an unpleasent tone insisted to talking to a supervisor who after questioning her twice about why I wasnt informed told me that I received a phone call about a week ago? Interesting that I had to request this information more than once to get it. This phone call ofcource was never received by me and since its my personal cell phone number they have on file there is no way any of my children would of answered the call. I have also looked at my call log and I do not see any calls from this utility company. So this was another story.
This supervisor informed me that my bill was now $285 or something like that.By the way the total of the two months actual utility bills without the fee's im now being charged because of someone else's mistake is 212.00.. If my check actually bounced the fee would be only $25 the rest of the fee's are because I was turned off.
I am also told that the utility dosent have the bounce check that my bank would have it. Well being a business owner myself that makes absolutly no since at all since when a check bounces the bounced check is return to the depositor of the check. So I guess I now have to pay moneys out that I do not know I truly ow. I admit I was rediculously rude with the supervisor I realized after hanging up I best not call back since I will likely be charged even more phantom fee's if they get more upset with me.
With three other mouths to feed these fee's are insane. If the utility companys had competition they wouldnt be able to bully us in such a manner. Thank you for listening
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