The Outlet
I’m a sixty-year-old widow, and I live alone in a small suburban house, which means that certain things in my life are as predictable as sunrise. My routines are fixed. My habits are set. And my electricity bill, month after month, year after year, is almost exactly the same, because one person living quietly alone doesn’t have much variation in how much power she uses.
Which is why, when last month’s bill arrived and it was twice as high as it should have been, I nearly fell out of my kitchen chair.
Let me tell you about my life, briefly, so you understand the woman this happened to. My husband, Frank, passed away three years ago, and since then it’s just been me in the house we shared for thirty-one years, a modest place with a small yard and a garage and a lot of memories. I’m careful with money, not because I have to be exactly, Frank left me comfortable enough, but because being careful with money is simply who I am, who my whole generation is, people who lived through leaner times and never quite trusted that the good times would last. I track my spending. I clip coupons. I know, to within a few dollars, what every bill should be before I open it.
So a doubled electricity bill was not a small thing to me. It was an alarm going off. Two hundred and something dollars where there should have been a hundred and something. And I could not, for the life of me, figure out why.
I went through everything. I hadn’t bought any new appliances. Nothing had changed in my daily routine. I wasn’t running the air conditioning any more than usual. I checked all my appliances to see if something was malfunctioning, running constantly, drawing power. I unplugged things. I worried about it the way you worry about a thing you can’t explain, turning it over and over, wondering if there was a wiring problem, if my house was somehow leaking electricity, if I was going to have to pay for an electrician on top of the doubled bill.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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