A few more random notes that didn’t fit into the weekend wrap-up.

Number Three Behind The Wheel

L finally got her learner’s permit today. She had been gung-ho about driving since she was 13, and dove into the driver’s ed self-teaching program when we signed her up back in December. We’ve been taking her across the street to drive around the high school parking lot since last fall.

Then a couple friends, who are smart cookies like her, failed their learner’s permit written test on their first tries. I think that spooked her. And one day when she was out with S, S let L drive her Telluride on one of the most difficult roads on the north side of Indy, Kessler Boulevard. This is a four-lane road that is riddled with potholes, is extremely narrow, there is zero curb, where everyone drives way too fast, and has a brutal double curve that can be frightening to even experienced drivers when it gets busy. C and I both avoid it when we drive to CHS, trading a slightly longer route for not having to deal with Kessler’s headaches. L didn’t wreck, thank goodness, but it freaked her out and she suddenly stopped asking to drive or bringing up going to take her permit test.

Fortunately she finally got past all that, studied this week, and knocked the test out in like six minutes.

Now she goes onto the Ready to Drive list, and hopefully we can get her six in-car sessions scheduled and completed before she goes back to school in August. The school across the street has a 12-week wait, so we signed her up in Carmel which was 3–4 weeks last we heard.

The Electric Company

We’ve had the joy this year of dealing with insane billing issues from our electric company. Late last year they updated their billing system – to serve us better, of course – and the result has been a disaster for some people. They claim only 10% of their customers have been affected, but it has to be more otherwise the issues I’m about to lay out would have been fixed by now.

We do the budget billing plan, paying the same amount each month. That total gets adjusted up or down each June based on our usage over the previous year. For some reason they adjusted ours in February, increasing it by over 50%. Our new monthly amount was 28% higher than our biggest month of usage charge over the past year. A couple weeks later we got an email saying we had been billed incorrectly and a credit would appear on our account. Of course they still took out the incorrect amount, because we are signed up for automatic payments.

The next three months we did not get a bill at all. I kept checking the local media and Reddit, and our company said “a small number of people” were not receiving bills. Others were getting bills that were wildly incorrect. One lady called and they couldn’t find a record that she had made a payment on her account since 1970. She was not close to 54 years old. The company claimed they were working on a fix and were not disconnecting service or charging late fees for customers getting incorrect bills.

Obviously we could have kept paying our monthly amount but given we had zero confidence they wouldn’t apply it incorrectly, we just waited for a new bill.

When we didn’t get a bill again in May, I called the special line set up to handle billing issues. I talked to a lady who could not have been less helpful. She wasn’t rude or anything, she just had zero ability to assist me. It took her five minutes and multiple tries to even find our account. I slowly repeated our account number three times and our address as many times. Despite my name being listed first on our bill, she said I was not on the account and asked if I had S’s permission to access our account. We’re all for challenging traditional gender roles in this house, but I thought that was wild that I was being asked if I had permission from my wife to call about our bill. I thought about telling her that my wife lets me have my own credit card and drive on my own, too.

Eventually she found our account. She couldn’t tell me a damn thing I couldn’t see for myself when I looked at our information online. Her advice: keep checking every few weeks, they were working on a fix.

Uh-huh.

We finally got a bill two weeks later. It charged us for the three months we had not been billed, which is appropriate. What was not appropriate was that they charged us three months at the new, incorrect, budget amount.

So I called the regular customer service line. It literally took eight minutes navigating their phone tree before I finally smashed 0 and was able to speak to a real person. Every other option just played various recordings, most encouraging customers to use the company website to get assistance.

Once connected with a live human, I explained my dilemma: our budget bill went up much higher than our highest actual bill, we never received the credit promised, we didn’t receive a bill for three months, and now we were being charged 3x the incorrect amount.

This lady was very nice. She told me to just pay our old budget amount. She said they were working to fix all these errors, but, “Obviously they haven’t got to yours yet,” she said with a sarcastic chuckle. She said she would flag our account again so it, hopefully, gets reviewed and corrected. I could tell she didn’t have much confidence that would happen. Unlike the other lady, who seemed to just be reading from the script in front of her, this woman was friendly and empathetic. I told her I knew she was probably getting tons of calls about these issues, and appreciated that she actually seemed to care about helping me and was nice about it. I think I made her day. Hell, it’s not her fault her company sucks.

So we’ll see if we get a corrected bill here in the next few weeks. I wouldn’t be surprised it if takes another call or two after that bill comes to get things straightened out.

I normally don’t post on Reddit, but I’ve checked into a couple threads on the local thread chiming in with my experience. Again, it sure seems like more than 10% of customers are affected.

Strangely our state utility board has taken zero action to force the power people to get this straightened out. They even approved a big rate increase in the midst of this. Again, to better serve us, I’m sure.

Bill Walton

I found the varied reactions to Bill Walton’s death very interesting. You either loved his schtick as a broadcaster or you hated it, and that view affected your first thoughts when you learned he had passed.

I did not like his TV style at all. That’s because I’m a super fan that takes sports way too seriously. When I’m watching a KU game, I want descriptions and analysis of what is happening. Not wild asides that have nothing to do with what’s on the court. Nor histrionic statements based on one play rather than an entire body of work. So I loathed the rare times that Walton did a KU game. He distracted from whatever the Jayhawks were doing on the court. In time I learned to keep the TV muted, or the volume barely high enough to catch some crowd noise, if he was on the mic.

As I thought about his life and career, though, I realized he really was a trendsetter. All of these modern, alternate broadcasts, which have reached their peak with the Manningcasts of Monday Night Football, stem from how he called games. “Don’t take these things so seriously,” he seemed to be saying, “they are just games and there are far more important things in life like your relationships with the people you love and how you interact with the planet we call home.” Well, the Mannings and Kevin Harts of the world probably aren’t thinking that deeply, but Walton opened a door for non-traditional broadcasts that people who don’t care about the game turn in to watch.

That’s a much healthier view of sports that I generally take, at least when my teams are involved. It was good that someone was pushing that idea, even if Walton’s technique was maddening.

For all his goofiness and frustrating qualities, the outpouring of love for him after his death has been wonderful to read. He was a truly unique human, and he very much lived the peace and love values his generation espoused in the Sixties. There have been so many examples of him going out of his way to make other people’s lives better in difficult moments, or needling people he cared about with perfectly timed barbs.

Let’s not forget that Walton was a remarkable player who had his career cut short by a series of cruel injuries. He was one of the most dominant college players ever and was on that trajectory in the NBA until his feet and legs started failing him.

I won’t miss avoiding him on ESPN, but I appreciate that he made the world a better place in his 71 years.