Before you pay your bill …

Arthur Vidro
On Consumerism
The City of Claremont sent out its quarterly water and sewer bill to city residents on October 31. That was the postmark date.

Payment for that bill is due … September 9.

That’s right. The city sent out a bill with a due date more than seven weeks before the mailing. Other mistakes: it reflected the period of water usage from April 3 to July 5, and it gave a billing date of July 31.

I dug up my receipt to verify we had paid our water bill for that quarter. Then I noticed the bill posted October 31 is an exact duplicate of the one that was sent three months earlier. All the way down to how much water we had used.

Chances are, nobody uses the same amount of water two quarters in a row.

To its credit, the city quickly became aware of its mistake. When I telephoned to inquire, the automated system that tries to prevent you from reaching a human being acknowledged the error and said to disregard the bill and that a correct one would be sent in the upcoming week.

The corrected bills were sent out, postmarked November 6, with a due date of December 11, and covering the period of July 5 to October 2.

The bogus bill was an honest mistake. But it points out potential dangers to our reliance on computers without proper human supervision.

And the city was saddled with the cost of an additional mailing.

Just as the bogus water bill arrived, a woman in a writers’ organization I belong to posted that she was trying to sell a ticket to the banquet for an upcoming conference in Massachusetts that she could no longer attend.

I reached out to inform her of what had happened to me less than a decade ago: I had registered to attend the same annual writers’ conference. But a week before the event, my father was suddenly on his death bed. I wanted to be ready to attend his funeral, and in my family we bury the dead 24 to 48 hours after passing.

About a day or two before the conference weekend, I sent an e-mail to the people running the event — would have telephoned, but was never given a phone number. Told them I would not be attending, explained my father’s being on his death bed, my being too emotionally wrecked to attend, and asked if maybe our two registration fees (roughly $200 apiece) could be refunded. (We had never purchased the banquet tickets.)

I pointed out they were under no obligation to refund our money, but it would be nice to have that money available again, perhaps to pay for travel to my father’s funeral. And if no refund was possible, I added, I would have no hard feelings but hoped they would at least let some last-minute wannabe attendees use the registrations we had paid for so that some strangers of their choosing could attend the sold-out conference. That way, the money wouldn’t have gone to waste.

The reply, when it came, was that it was too late to allow for anyone else to use our registration fees. And as much as they disliked granting refunds, in our case they would make an exception. And lo and behold, the next credit card statement showed the refunding of the registration fees for my wife and myself.

That was excellent customer service.

So this month I advised the woman trying to sell her banquet ticket that if her reason for not attending was sufficiently powerful, then the people in charge might grant a refund for her registration and her banquet ticket.

She replied that back problems have immobilized her, and she will undergo back surgery a few days after the conference. She had explained this to the people running the conference. Their reply was: “It is simply not possible because the programming won’t allow it.” Then they had suggested she try to sell the banquet ticket, to recoup some of her investment.

Sounds like the people truly wanted to grant a full refund but had been rebuffed by their computer system. I reached out to them to verify. Yep, that’s what had happened. The organizers wanted to grant a refund, but the computer system they were using would not allow it.

Can’t get mad at the people. They’re hard-working volunteers. But they are limited to what their computer decrees is acceptable.

In less than a decade, control of decisions for this conference has passed from the people running the conference to the organization’s computer system.

And if a person supposedly in charge wishes to make a decision that goes against the installed computer program, well, the computer has final say.

When personal computers first came out, they seemed to be a potentially useful tool to be used and controlled by the humans who owned them.

Turns out that has not always been the case.

Nowadays, it is too often the people who own the computers who are controlled by the computers and/or the computer programming.

In any case, before you pay a bill — any bill — sit down and leisurely read it over. You might find a glaring mistake.