I'm still not pleased with the outcome. I still want the companies to be required to appreciate customers. Not only should all property owners have a legal right to get ourselves off the grid, at least for our primary energy requirements, as fast as possible; not only should companies be required to meet our private requirements for any use we may allow them to make of solar, water, or pedal power generators on our property; but also, allowing a reasonable amount of time, the companies need to be making steady progress toward relying on our surplus private energy supply rather than on dams or coal-burning plants as a primary energy source for everyone. We may always need the companies and a few of the big unsustainable plants they've built, but we don't need them as much as they've tried to make people think, and they should be forced to acknowledge continually that they need us.
Not only do I agree that people should stop using electricity before they run up bills they can't pay; I'd be in favor of people's being able to shut off their own main switches, at that point, without the company sending anyone out. No kilowatts flowing into the house, no mounting bill! But I'm opposed to the companies being allowed to charge extra fees, especially when the fee is more than twice the amount of the unpaid bill, for disconnecting people's electricity. It does not cost $50 to flip a switch, nor should companies be allowed to think in terms of "punishing" the customers on whom their existence depends.)
Hurricane Florence came and went, with none of the melodrama associated with the word "hurricane," but a lot of rain. Two feet, about 0.6 metres, of rain is bad enough in low-lying ground, but as the rain moved west, more of it poured down over the East Coast. A lot of buildings got wet. Damage was done to the power grid.
What do our beloved utility companies do in this kind of situation? They finance rapid restoration of service, in a weather emergency, by creative billing techniques.
The biggest electricity bill I ever got was the "estimated" bill for a month during most of which there was no grid-based electric power in Scott County. When I went online that winter, I went online from Kingsport. I received a bill for approximately four times my average bill for months when I'd been using refrigerator and water heater and all. I paid up, complaining vigorously, and received a refund a few months later. I knew the money had been used to bring in laborers up from Atlanta, down from Cleveland, to clean up cables that were buried under a foot of snow.
This month, I had some other bills to pay, so I let the bill for electricity wait. After all, the amount that was overdue was, what, $25? I'm frugal with electricity, and it's been a mild summer, with little need for climate control. My bills have been below $20 each month. "We don't send people out to disconnect people for that kind of small change," I've heard, in other years.
The hurricane changed everything. I went home yesterday and found that my electricity had indeed been disconnected. The exact amount overdue: $19.43.
I have no use for the whole idea of a central grid, and monthly bills, and all those dangerous cables strung through forests to crash down every time the wind blows. The weather was quite pleasant. After eating a cold dinner I lighted a candle, worked a New York Times Sunday crossword I'd been saving, and went to bed as usual.
One of those unusual bills I had to pay this month is for repairing my own dear desktop computer. I should probably explain this, too.
All North Americans are not actually the same size, but almost all North American furniture comes in the same size. Basically that means too small to be ergonomically correct for most men and too big to be ergonomically correct for most women. Massage therapists can make livings just treating the aches and pains people develop from working at one-size-for-all desks every day.
In my home office, there is no one-size-for-all desk. Of the three I used to own, I've sold two; one is still in Grandma Bonnie Peters' home office, where its being too high doesn't bother her so much because she spends so little time typing at it. I sit on a nice low bench made by putting a board over a camp cot, which is the right distance from the floor for my less-than-5'10" legs, and put my computer on an unmatched pair of nice low tables with the big fat CRT monitor slightly higher than the keyboard, which is just right for my less-than-5'10" arms. I can type literally all day long. I've made a habit of giving myself hand, eye, and walk-about breaks at intervals in whatever I'm typing, but I have, as an experiment, typed in my home office for twenty hours. No shoulder pain. No carpal tunnel syndrome.
This, of course, was when I had the desktop computer's keyboard right at the edge of its table, so it fitted right under my hands and I worked with my elbows at a right angle. At a standard desk, even with the desktop computer's keyboard, my elbows would be at a less comfortable acute angle. I used to get cramps in my right shoulder from using a desktop computer mouse at the computer center.
The desktop computer eventually used up its memory. A hard drive had to be replaced. That was done at Christmas. It cost over $100. In the shop the computer came on flashing a message that a cable was not connected. "That doesn't seem to mean anything," said the man who'd installed the hard drive, "it boots up and runs just fine."
It did--but not for long. The message flashed every time I started the computer and, toward the end of June, the new hard drive died. Back to the shop I went. "How can we back up the files in case the next hard drive dies, too?" I asked. So the man looked inside the computer and found that, although the cable it had was adequate for all the actual work I'd been doing on it for twenty years, the newer hard drives--like the one installed last winter--were designed to require an additional cable, which "everybody" had already installed to power a modem. (My own desktop has never had a modem.) No wonder the new hard drive had burned out fast. It had been drawing more electricity through an inadequate supply...
I have been working on laptop computers at home. It's not obvious, to the minority of humankind who are exactly 5'10", that putting the battery compartment out in front of the keyboard would cause carpal tunnel syndrome. In fact that design innovation was touted as helping prevent carpal tunnel syndrome in taller typists. Let's just say that having the battery compartment in front of the keyboard forces me to type with both wrists and elbows at odd angles, so every day I have backaches and, if I've been seriously writing, numbness and tingling, and also a stiff neck from sitting with my shoulders hunched up as if I were doing an impression of Richard flippin' Nixon...so, just using a laptop as my main computer is not an option.
Let's just say that, even in winter, I don't want the radiation of a laptop going into my actual physical lap all day, so that's not an option either. Laptops as main computers equal disability. Desktop computer is a physical necessity for me.
Electricity is necessary only for the computer. If I don't have a computer at home...I'd miss being able to write on weekends, but I wouldn't miss being on the grid, either. There are public computer centers. The Internet Portal does at last have a locally sponsored storefront, and if I weren't paying for electricity at home, I could use the money to pay for it at the store, stop using up bandwidth at cafe/school/library computer centers, and start storekeeping already.
I've not had the extra money to do it, but for the past two years I've been thinking seriously that even a gas-powered generator, much as I'd prefer solar or pedal power, could give me the best of both worlds.
I've also heard, not in Virginia but in less civilized parts of the country, of people having gone completely off the grid and then being told they couldn't prove they were living on property that somebody wanted to grab using "eminent domain." I know very few natural-born citizens of these United States who want to live on property without a cushy paved driveway; that does not mean that assets like the mountain spring, the natural waterfall, and the sunny bank, might not attract evildoers who don't intend to live there.
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| https://www.paypal.me/PriscillaKingUS/15 |
"Farmers are the new Indians," somebody told Kathleen Norris, years ago. Hah. I actually am part "Indian," some of the last of the indigenous blood on the ancestral land. I'm not young. I've had a rich life. I'm not eager to die on my land rather than live off it, but I'm not afraid to do that, either. (Introverts avoid unnecessary risks, so we seem cautious, even timid, when we do things like buckle our seat belts; that's in no way to be confused with a fear of necessary risks.)
So when I talked to the anonymous robot-girl at the utility company, I had all this in mind. Any attempt to extort money from me will cost your company a lot more than you hope to gain, I said.
You pulled this stunt in 2016, I said, and as a result you lost all payments from me for six months. And it would've been a lot longer than that if relatives hadn't wanted electric heat and lights for Thanksgiving. And, due to Mother's health, we're not planning Thanksgiving at my house this year. You can lose a whole account for ever if you tick me off again.
Robot-girl kept repeating "I'm sorry," obviously not being it, and repeating that the new company policy now required that somebody scrape up not only the total amount of the bill, but a fee that would raise the total price above $100, until I think even the battery-powered phone I was using got bored and switched itself off.
There is a church fund that's set up for the express purpose of keeping the lights on at the homes of widows who don't ordinarily depend on handouts, who give something back to the church. I'm not a regular church member, not all that old, and not in any physical danger, but I did happen to have a nice blanket to give to the church, worth more than I was asking for; I did happen to have an ongoing writing job that would make it very inconvenient not to have a computer at home this weekend.
Let's see what happens, I said to myself, and I walked up the street to the church, blanket in hand. I found the church secretary talking on the phone.
There is no way...I could not believe what I was hearing. "There must be some mistake...A, could you check this? B, could you call C? They're threatening to cut off our electricity in the church...I know we've paid the bill, but..."
The church was being double-billed, just as I'd been double-billed in 2016!
"If we have the money, we'll pay your bill," the church secretary said hopelessly. I knew and she knew that the mistake was not made by the church, and will not be found and fixed for a few months; and meanwhile the church does not have the money for me, nor does it have the money for who knows how many old widows are on electric-powered oxygen pumps and are being hit up for money this month. The one thing I've done today that I'm not proud of was asking. On hearing what the church secretary was saying I should have just walked out the door--although I don't know how much she would have suffered from curiosity.
I enjoy having electricity; I use electricity as a tool of my trade. I do not, however, need electricity.
Time for a vote, Gentle Readers. What do you think I should do? It is now possible to vote with Paypal!
If you think everyone should be charitable, because people on the East Coast are less prepared to go off the grid than I am and keeping them on the grid really does take money and everybody should be willing to contribute something to disaster relief, click here to pay the bill:
https://www.paypal.me/PriscillaKingUS/100
If you think I should just go off the grid permanently now, click here to pay for the generator to be put in before the cold weather arrives:
https://www.paypal.me/PriscillaKingUS/125
(Well, those links have served their original purpose, but people can still use them to pay for more of whatever they want from this web site. We can even add one. The church has a sleek-looking web site at http://www.fbcgatecity.org/ , and they'll gladly process checks sent directly to them by mail, but they don't seem to have Paypal.me links. Paypal users who'd like to contribute to the emergency fund may use this one to route cash directly to the First Baptist Church. Their emergency fund is distributed as sudden needs are reported so it's more likely to be used for the benefit of relatively well-off widows who live in Gate City and attend Baptist services, but they don't discriminate against non-members, non-Christians, or people in other towns, at all. To support the fund by Paypal, please be sure to type "FBC" into the message field when using this link:
https://www.paypal.me/PriscillaKingUS/25
Paypal.me links are price-specific; I picked US$25 as an average amount people contribute to church funds, with kids putting a dollar in the plate and businessmen writing checks for 10% of their weekly income, but here's a tip. You can go into the browser bar, backspace over the number at the end of a Paypal.me link, and type in the number of whole monetary units you want to contribute, and the system will generate a new page for whatever whole number you type in. If you type in "FBC" I'll carry that amount of cash to the church--and if it's an amount that looks silly for an adult to deliver to a church, I'll mention your screen name.)
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