Final Bill

Mrs. T well understands that if bill paying fell under my area of responsibility we would be homeless in several months. For better or worse this area of our domestic relations fall under her bailiwick, and I know better than to question or comment.

That's why I got the hairy eyeball yesterday when I opened the small envelope that arrived from the sewer company in yesterday's post.

Each of us has bills they have to grit their teeth to pay. For some its the cable, for others the phone bill. For Mrs. T it's the sewer bill. Why? It's a simple, but ugly story.

We are not sewer company customers. We use septic, our rain runoff drains into our lake, which overflows onto our creek to the neighbors lake. Sewer Company customers we are not. Yet we get a bill.

The sewer company, in a most ingenious and highly recommended, if you can pull it off, scheme, decided they could raise revenue exponentially by billing people who were not their customers, for services that they had not provided. The rationale went like this. Although you don't use our services, you benefit from them, so send us $10 per month, subject to late fees and future rate increases. The moral equivalent of my billing you $120 per year, in mutual hope my grand daughter becomes a doctor and saves your sorry self some day.

We bitched and screamed and eventually a class action lawsuit was filed. Yesterday we received this letter.

Think we'll ever live to see a refund?

Toad