Oracle Online

I moved to an apartment this summer. My landlord told me that she would transfer the electric bill to my name. Two months later I still had not receive a bill, yet my landlord said she’d definitely transferred it to my name. Perplexed, I was about to look up Xcel’s phone number when a former roommate, who I had not lived with in two years, called. He told me that he was getting my electric bill. Apparently Xcel decided to send my bill to him instead of me, for reasons I can’t even guess. His current roommate called and yelled at them, and several weeks later I finally received my bill, for $100. My roommate said he accidentally paid my first bill, thinking it was his own, meaning the bill was for two months. My current month’s charges were $19, leaving a previous balance for one month’s usage of $79, plus a $1.20 late fee for not paying a bill that wasn’t sent to me. I immediately called to complain and was told that I’m responsible for the bill (Aren’t they obligated to send my billing rights, and send them to me instead of my former roommate?). I was told that they would send my earlier bills so I could see the previous charges. I’d have them by the end of the week, they said. That was two and a half weeks ago. I wonder if they sent the bills to someone else I used to live with, or if this time they decided to send them to Santa Claus. I’ve been calling every other day for the last week and a half to find out, and have been unable to connect to a live person, no matter how long I stay on hold. Now, is this efficient? Incompetent, ridiculous, pathetic, perhaps, but certainly not efficient.

Nor are billing and customer service their only areas of concern. Not too long ago, the Pioneer Press ran a series of exposÄs in which they found that Xcel was taking serious shortcuts on repairs, including using duct tape where permanent fixes were needed; Xcel was accused of falsifying records in order to meet state standards regarding duration of power outages; and the security at the nuclear power plant was so lax that an investigator was able to enter the plant and look around unchallenged. I strongly suspect that it would be hard for a state-run utility to perform worse than Xcel.

No one has adequately explained to me just why privately run industry means better quality more cheaply, but I can understand why the opposite is true, why privatization means lousy quality. When a utility that’s typically public is entrusted with a private company, their main goal is profit. Profit is most readily obtained not by improving quality, but by cutting costs, which means duct-tape fixes, lax security, poor customer service and billing, and possibly falsifying records instead of investing in better equipment and procedures needed to meet standards. And worse, since Xcel is a monopoly, they are completely unresponsive to customer demands; we, their customers, can’t exactly buy power from another company.
So let’s make our electric company responsive by taking public ownership of it. After all, if we live in a democracy, why is our economy, including how we get our electricity, so undemocratic?