Utility Blues

 

I got this message on my iPhone the other day. Shortly thereafter both Apple CarPlay and my ability to charge the phone stopped.

Weird, my phone had never been wet, what was the deal?

I went to the ATT store near Albertsons and the girl there said that I still owe five hundred bucks on the phone (really?) and that I was not eligible for an upgrade.

She suggested that I try the bag of rice. Said that it would not charge there either.

I took the phone home, put it in a bag of rice for a night and still no go. I was mulling things over and decided to buy a new cable for the car, what the hell?

Found one at Grocery Outlet for $1.89 and bingo, the whole thing worked again! Eureka!

Just to make sure I made an appointment for the Genius Bar at Apple the next day. Supposedly once there is moisture there is corrosion and my phone was not long for this world.

Only the diagnostic test showed no moisture and no corrosion. A little dust but that is it. I almost shelled out over a grand or more for a new phone and it turns out that everything was fixed by a $1.89 cord.

 Amazing.

As Ronald Reagan once said, Trust but verify.

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I received my SDGE bill for last month the other day. Typically around three hundred dollars, this one was for over eight hundred. 

And we never ran the heater last month. What was up?

Well, we know what was up, unfortunately. The same thing happened a year ago when we got a $1200 bill. SDGE is estimating our reads again.

Here is the backstory. We pay ten dollar a month extra so SDGE will come out and read our electric meter. They don't want to. So they prefer to give us these outrageous bills in a way to extort us in to changing over to the Smart Meter.

We had a Smart meter on our wind machine in the grove. And one day it exploded and caught on fire. We watched it. My wife does not want to see that happen to our house.

I was too frustrated to do battle with them this week so she called them yesterday. They admitted that the usurious bill was an estimate and said that we could solve the problem by converting over.

I think that is an awful way to do business. How about reading the meter like we pay you to and stop charging us with these ridiculous and fanciful power bills?