Pacific Gay & Electric Company: Hey you guys!

You hear of all sorts of fraud and shenanigans regarding power companies in general and PG&E in particular.  I remember a tale of a math teaching using an electric bill for math problems and even professors couldn't get the companies calculations to make sense II remember reading the story years ago but currently can't find the article in the amount of time I'm willing to spend looking for it).  It all seems a bit of smoke and mirrors, if not outright malfeasance.

So it came time to pay my bill this month and I decided instead to pay a call on PG&E.  Four voice menus and twenty minutes of hold time later (thank goodness for hands-free), a very polite and affable customer service rep gave me very pleasant replies which amounted to no answers.

Heres' the thing: in October when Dad went in to the hospital and subsequently died, I went home for two weeks.  When the roof was getting torn off in November, I went home for two weeks.  IN December, I went home for two weeks at Christmas.  I may have used up all of my leave, but I spent six weeks out of the past three months in Nashville.  That is to say, not in my apartment.  And yet each month, my utility bill increased over the months when I was actually there.  If I am not running the stove or turing on any appliances, it would reason that my consumption (not accounting for the vampire effect) would drop considerably, maybe even much as half.  But according to PG&E, these are actual readings from a meter reader.   There are no smart meters at my building yet, but we are scheduled for installation...sometime.

They are telling me that when I am gone half the time, I am using the same or as much gas and electricity as when I am there full time.

I'm calling shenanigans on this one.  There is something seriously rotten in the PG&E assessment and billing and it's not the sulfur they add to the natural gas.

I want my data entered somewhere.  These can't be honest calculations.   Surely there is some conspiracy-inclined investigator looking into such things.

Just putting this out there for Google should such be the case.