A letter to the gas company

Dear Mr/s TRU Energy (if that even is your real name),

It has now been two years since we first contacted you about getting billed for our gas usage at XX XXXXXXXXXXXXX, Collingwood 3066. We aren’t writing to you because we don’t think we should have to pay you anything (after all, we contacted you, not the other way around), it’s that we only want to pay what is fair. In the two years we have been pursuing this matter we have variably been quoted bills ranging from a few hundred dollars to $4889.63. Indeed, on June 12 2012 we were issued with a gas account for $1040.25 (based on an estimated meter reading), including the deduction of just a tick under $4000 from the ‘Opening Balance’. I have no idea how you arrived at this figure, but I have no choice but to trust that you know what you are doing.

But then, with the due date of this bill approaching, we receive another letter from you stating that you have “fixed this now and your bills will be sent to you within the next 10 days”. As I’m sure you can appreciate, we put the previous bill aside and waited expectantly for, after 2 years of phfaphfing around, this whole saga to draw to an end.

But alas, no. What should arrive in the mail this evening (26 July 2012) but a bill for $2,888.12? Oh no. Surely there must be some mistake. You promised this was all going to be resolved soon, but this charade just seems to go on and on and on.

But, I am nothing if not an optimist. I foresee a light at the end of the purgatorial tunnel and we can finally get out of this holding pattern of painfully mixed metaphor and resolve this debacle. For you see, this new bill also contains details of what are supposedly the previous three bills, so we have an ongoing record of exactly how much gas we are supposed to have used, and in which months we used it. For instance, in April/May 2012 we used 24.82Mj of gas per day (2098.11Mj). In Feb/March 2012 we used 34.39Mj of gas per day (1489.79Mj). Included was also a bill for June/July 2012 for 3.85Mj of gas used per day, but I’m prepared to disregard this figure as we moved out of this address early in June.

So, from February to June 2012 we demonstrably used a grand total of 3587.9Mj of gas. At your usage charge for this period of $0.014715/Mj, plus your supply charge of $32.24 for 2 months, this works out to be $117.28 for 4 months worth of normal gas usage. If anything, that seems even less than what an average couple could expect to pay for 4 months of gas. After all, if the amount of something you are actually using is less than the service, you’re probably doing alright.

But, clearly, $117.28 << $2888.

So what should be there, taking up so much space in the bar chart on page 3? Oh wait, that’s supposedly our gas usage for Dec 2011- Jan 2012, weighing in at an astonishing 57 times greater than our usage for the very next period of Feb/March 2012. 57 TIMES! That’s 1974.82Mj! That’s $27.38! PER! DAY! OMG! WTF!

Oh wait, silly me. I forgot that was the period in which I converted our gas system into a flamethrower and started operating a hot air ballooning business out of our kitchen! /sarc

Now here I should probably take a detour and mention that some 18 months after initially making contact with you to send us our gas bill, you finally arranged for a meter reader to come to our house one fine sunny Saturday morning in early summer 2011. The gas meter is, for some reason known only to the owner, buried inside a wall. It is located in the corner behind a kitchen bench, and a layer of plasterboard is nailed in place to cover it. Only while laying cockroach baits in darkened recesses did we happen to stumble across it. And yet as long as it took us to find it, it somehow took you even longer to come around and read it so that you could get paid the money you rightly earned by connecting and supplying gas to our humble, rented abode.

So before December 2011, the gas usage that you claim we used is nothing more than an estimate based upon what I can only imagine to be average usage figures for similar sized homes in similar areas. But even a casual parsing of the bar charts that accompany each bill show that the average usage is far above what has been demonstrated to be our actual usage, even when seasonally adjusted.

Now instead of getting up on our high horses and demanding that we don’t have to pay a cent, or threatening to go to the consumer ombudsman, or worse, Today Tonight, we are prepared to try to strike a compromise.

What we propose is as follows:

We are prepared to pay for 9 months of gas, as is our obligation “under government regulations that apply in your state”.

We will pay at the same rate as you had calculated for the period Feb-May 2012. That is $0.014715/Mj.

The same service fee per billing period ($32.24 for every 2 months) will be paid.

Our usage is to be calculated at 50Mj per day, a figure significantly higher than our highest rate of actual usage (34.39Mj/day for Feb/March 2012).

Now if my calculations were correct, that would be 50Mj/day multiplied by 274 days equals 13,700Mj of gas used.

13,700Mj multiplied by $0.014715 equals $201.60 in gas usage.

Service fee of $32.24/2 months. $32.24 times 4.5 is $145.08.

$201.60 plus $145.08 equals $346.68.

Let’s be generous and make it a rounded $350, payable in a lump sum.

Let us know if you agree.