Working for Nicor

I have decided to take on a new part time job. Once a month I am going out to our gas meter, calling up Nicor and reporting the numbers. Why am I doing this? Well, I am not getting paid and we are not getting a discount on our gas bill. However, the Nicor employees can't seem to be relied upon for actually reading out meter and someone has to do it. I guess that someone is me.

For the past 3 months (June, July and August) our gas bill has been record-breakingly low. Sure it seems thrilling to receive a bill for only $35. It makes those $550 gas bills from the winter seem like a distant memory. However, after 3 months in a row, I started to wonder. Surely we were using SOME gas. I mean, I do cook dinner most nights - we do actually shower with hot water. And in fact, we have a gas powered pool heater. When the 3rd cheap bill arrived in August, I decided to call.

The customer service rep asked me to go outside and read the meter to her. Sure enough, Nicor had been estimating my gas usage instead of actually reading it. I am not sure what data they were using to estimate it with though. When I read the numbers to her, it turned out that our bill was really $363 - not $35. They were off by 1,000% basically. How nice.

If they would have just done their job correctly and read our meter, we would have had a bill for $110 each month. Instead we paid only $35 a month for June and July and now have to make up $363 for August. Why can't people just do their jobs? really?