Transalta Utilities, our Alberta, Canada untility just sent my daughter an OVERDUE bill for $4755 for the month of September. It was really $163 and was paid in October, so on a zero balance, they are having a bit of a problem, and when she phoned they said the computers were down.

My son worked in Boston for the last 2 weeks revamping software for a company and they will be just fine, but he spoke to many computer people in his travels and many are worried about their software integration (guess that means interacting with other companies software?). But they said in effect "you can only check so much, there is not enough money to check it all". He had planned to visit a friend in Toronto for the New Year, but has decided to stay close to home (and the food supplies) this year.

-- Laurane (familyties@rttinc.com), November 13, 1999

Answers

Laurane

Good to see you posting, Dale Way mentioned in his latest thread that utilities may have more problem being economicly viable than being able to generate power. Good thing Alberta has tons of money :o)

There are a couple of regulars here from Alberta and my sister lives in Sherwood park (not during the rollover though :o)

Trans Alta actually has the distiction of having one of the first reviews of checking embedded systems on the net. Funny province though that grows so fast its power supplier has problems keeping up to demands of the industries their.

I am in Victoria BC but used to spend lots of time in Jasper and the NWT so I have been around your (often) lovely province. Hopefully Alberta holds up OK.

Good luck

-- Brian (imager@home.com), November 13, 1999.

$4755 for one month.

-- a little high (even@when.cold), November 13, 1999.

Thanks for posting this, Laurane. Most worrisome. This error is glaringly obvious; other errors may be of a lesser nature and therefore harder to discover and to argue with the issuer. I wonder how many people received these inaccurate invoices?

-- Rachel Gibson (rgibson@hotmail.com), November 13, 1999.

---pretty funny! hahahahahahaha--hope you got them dogs to quit eating the chikkens and stuff! hahahahahahahahahahahah gonna need it! got wood?

naw, we're "on track"! zog

-- zog (zzoggy@yahoo.com), November 13, 1999.

Transalta also announced aprox. 6 weeks ago that they were stocking large amounts of groceries for their workers. Even though these guys have been working long and hard on the problem they must not feel real confident. I think system wide testing before the rollover is the problem.

-- Harvey Wilson (harvey@hotmail.com), November 13, 1999.

Harvey

BC Hydro mentioned something about this saying that it is common for Trans Alta to stock up food for the remote locations every year (Alberta has very remote locations) and that the press picked this up and ran with the story without really thinking about it, suprize, suprize. Really that is a red herring Y2K story with out much basis in relevance.

-- Brian (imager@home.com), November 13, 1999.

Brian

I have got to take issue with some of what you've said here. First, Alberta's "remote locations" are no more remote than are any "remote locations" in B.C. Is B.C. Hydro buying food for its employees? Second, while TransAlta may indeed buy food for its employees at this time every year (although I've seen no verification of that point), I believe it is the quantity of food it is presently buying to which attention is being paid.

Laurane

I've found a second instance of TransAlta billing problems. A friend in St. Albert says her October bill was twice the amount of her September bill without an increase in power usage on her part.

-- Rachel Gibson (rgibson@hotmail.com), November 14, 1999.