Comment by SoftTalker
1 year ago
I once got a $65,000 water bill from the city for one month. I laughed and called them and asked them to re-read the meter and correct it, and expected a quick resolution. But no, they insisted it was correct for some time and that I needed to pay it. They said I probably had a leaky faucet or running toilet.
There was no awareness on the part of the customer service people how ridiculous that was. It would be physically impossible for my service pipe to deliver that volume of water even if it had been running full open for the entire month. I kept escalating until I reached someone who agreed, and they sent someone out to re-read the meter. And my bill was reduced to about $35.00, the normal amount.
Front line customer support isn't always very in tune with what is sensible for a given customer's account.
To be fair to front line support -- a lot of times it's just a warm body reading a script and it's paid accordingly.
Not always - but a lot of the times, especially for lower quality companies.
Water is a regulated utility. Anyone in a similar situation can contact the government authority who will gleefully tell the company to go to hell and possibly implement fines for inappropriate billing.
I wish that was so straight forward. You can google this incident where an empty lot got a 35K water bill and the water company said it was an error, then backtracked on that and still saying 35K is due.
> Towards the end of 2023, the DWM seemingly corrected the issue. Revive received an email stating: “The prior balance on the account reflected water leakage that was the result of Department of Watershed actions. Once the leak was addressed and the account properly adjusted, the corrected balance for the property is $219.24.” However, DWM soon backtracked and claimed that the $219.24 quote was made in error and that the nearly $30,000 balance still applied.
https://lawblog.legalmatch.com/2024/02/26/empty-atlanta-lot-...
Sounds like some kind of corruption scheme or a very isolated case.