I just got off the phone with my Mom. We’ve (mostly her) have been dealing with this fiasco all week over a stupid typo. A little back story; Before I moved in with Dave, I lived in a condo that my parents owned. I paid them rent and they were my landlord. A few weeks after I moved out, a lady moved in (The real estate agent my parents use is really good at her job.) Since everything happened so fast, my Mom just had her switch over the utility and electric bills from my name to her name. It was just the simplest way to do it, or so we thought.
Yesterday I got a recorded message from my old electric company, which I found odd considering I don’t live there anymore and all. I called my Mom to ask her what was up and she tells me about this huge fiasco that she has been dealing with for days. Apparently, the real estate agent is really good at selling, but not so much at typing. She made a typo on the address on the lease, putting 7516 instead of 7616. And I guess the current tenant of the condo isn’t good at reading, because she didn’t realize the address was wrong on the lease and went to switch all of her bills over with the wrong address. She was paying the bills for the house down the street instead of the one she lived in. So she gets a letter in the mail saying she needs to pay her electric bill soon or it will be shut off. And before you ask why she didn’t get the original bill in the mail, she wouldn’t have because I was signed up for paperless statements. I paid all of my bills online, and since the bill was still in my name, she didn’t get it anything until she was late with payment. So she’s all confused and calls my Mom. They figure out what has happened and the tenant agrees to call back during business hours to get things straightened out.
If I haven’t said it before, I absolutely hate my old electric company. Not only are they the only company in the area that raised their rates astronomically, they are the most incompetent pricks ever. The tenant calls to get things straightened out, and instead of changing the mistake, they shut off the electric at the guys house at 7516. He is understandably pissed off and calls the tenant and the real estate agent bitching. The tenant calls the electric company again to say they made a mistake and they try to charge her $20 to get the bill switched over to her name and get this guys electric back on. When they made the mistake. NICE.
Hopefully all this crap gets straightened out tomorrow and the tenant at my old place and the one at 7516 can sit down with a beer share a good laugh. Moral of this story: proofread!