Funniest Advice I've Received

Prompted by Long & Short Reviews... 

It's not really funny, but the most ridiculous advice I've received recently has come from the Appalachian Power Company.

APCo has installed "smart meters." Nobody really likes them but, in a rural area like mine, people think about those poor old meter readers floundering on our icy banks in winter, overexciting the dogs some of us keep, being panicked by the other animals whose company some of us enjoy, and, y'know, if a chip in the meter can deliver the same reading of kilowatts used to the company, it's not as if we ever enjoyed subjecting the meter readers to All That.

But these "smart meters" have some vague idea of what kind of device is plugged into each circuit and they can report to the company...

Actually they could have reported to the company, in my case, "Only the office circuit has been consistently active since the smart meter was installed. Old, oversized refrigerator and deep freezer, both of which the company promised to haul off, pay for, and help replace with a decent one-person fridge, neither of which the company has ever had the gumption to touch. Toilet and water heater, plugged into inactive circuits, running on solar power only. House is several times more 'energy-efficient' than what company has been calling 'efficient homes.' Company can either admit company has something to learn from the writer known as Priscilla King, or not presume to advise anybody about 'energy-efficiency,' to avoid public ridicule," if these meters were actually very "smart."

But they're not. They are remarkably thickwitted pieces of spyware. 

So in some months, like this one, I get pieces of junkmail--at my own expense mind you--advising me to save energy by setting my air conditioner to a higher temperature. (Air conditioner? ??? Where? There's one on the porch but it was bought for resale and I'm not sure that it's ever actually run...) 

"Smart meter" reckons 40% of my electricity bill has been spent on "cooling." The Lasko fan has been running almost continuously for a few weeks, this being what is known as high summer, but seriously? It ovvupies 12% of the active electrical sockets, which is to say one socket. It draws fewer kilowatts than the desktop computer, its monitor, and the laptop computer--separately--and they're all plugged in more of the time than the fan is. The fan is not a solid-state appliance that sucks energy when it's not running; the computers are. Going by the difference between what even the 250-watt electric heater did for the bill in winter, and what the Lasko fan does for it in summer, I think the fan is to blame for maybe 5% of my electric bill. Though each computer and the monitor has its own little internal fan, and I suppose running those for "cooling" purposes does run up the bill in summer.

"Smart meter" also had some smartypants ideas about how to make the water heater more efficient than it is on solar power alone. 

I think there might have been a few more tips, even more irrelevant, if that one hadn't made me fall about and cackle like Candidate Dowdypants. (I try to laugh as long and as loud as possible, for health reasons, thank you very much.) Then I said to myself, "Self, you sound like a person who has never even learned that trousers are supposed to reach the tops of the shoes! Get a grip!" I got a grip on something--I suppose it was the junkmail--and thought soberly about the fact that, in previous years, when people have received these letters of commendation for low consumption of electricity, they have mysteriously been billed more per kilowatt-hour next winter. When I remembered that I had been reading junkmail, all that remained was a crumpled wad of sweat-drenched paper (I had not been holding it directly in front of the Lasko fan, which is aimed mainly on the desktop computer, pampering the venerable thing--the desktop computer I'm using today is the one my late husband built in a college workshop). 

I think APCo needs the advice I usually give writers who are tempted to try using so-called artificial intelligence: Don't.