My local paper (Chico Enterprise-Record) printed a story about a system-wide computer glitch caused by PG&E's new computer billing system being unable to communicate with its old one. The old and the new came together in response to Calif deregulation of electricity. The glitch means an unknown number of customers have received no current bills and an unknown number may receive no bills.

I did a search of other Calif papers and failed to locate the story anywhere else. The link to the story is via my website, to the cut and paste version. Check out the other PG&E info if you haven't already.

Won't bother to post the obvious questions this brings up.

-- johno (jobriy2k@yahoo.com), November 23, 1999

Answers

Interesting. We have a rental house and our tenants mentioned to us last month that they hadn't gotten a bill for three months so we talked to our meter reader when he came. A few days later we recieved a bill for all of $5.34 (our part between tenants) notifying us that it was going to go to collection for lack of payment. The idiot at PG&E told us that's just the way they work even if it was their problem by not sending a bill.

That's one reason we put in a PV system. Screw um.

Todd

-- Todd Detzel (detzel@jps.net), November 23, 1999.

Why don't they EVER forget to send me a bill? Doesn't seem fair!

-- Mark Hillyard (foster@inreach.com), November 24, 1999.

"....an unknown number..."

Oh hell - they'll have fun figuring htis one out.

But - who cares - in the bump-in-the-road of life, who needs to know who all their customers are? Why should the company worry about losing a few collections every now and then?

--

Quite frankly, I'd not included "forgetting" customers in my economic concerns - but it seems that may be as important as the customers who "forget" to return their bills in Jan/Feb;

and those who "didn't get" bills in Jan/Feb/March;

and those who received their bills, returned them, but whose returns were legitimately "lost in the mail" in Jan/Feb/Mar.

....

Now, double/triple/quadruple (?) all the above for those who owe the IRS money......

-- Robert A. Cook, PE (Marietta, GA) (cook.r@csaatl.com), November 24, 1999.