Crazy Meralco Bill!

IT'S BEEN A CRAZY WEEK. What without a nanny to take care of the little boy! I have to take over nanny duties when I get home, not that I mind. Except that it pains me to have to leave him with my helper during the day, who isn't so keen on taking care of kids - being a kid herself. Still blessed to have a helper until end of the month though. After which, I desperately have to find househelp or else I'll have to take time off work! Nyar. And I cannot afford that.

Early this week, I came across Chuvaness' blog post on the crazy Meralco rate increase. Got me dreading my bill! True enough, when I got my bill last night, it was up by 120%!!! What the...???!!! So let's see... We were out a total of 5 days for the previous month, aircon usage has been limited to about 3x a week (normally, as a bonus to us on weekends), and an average of 5-6 hours per day only. We iron our clothes once a week; we have a spin dryer that gets used about 2x a week and it's not the heavy-duty, heater dryers that eat up electricity. I gave away my microwave. We cut off the water heaters. We have two fans. And a refrigerator. Plus we use the rice cooker once a day. And given that the month that had passed gave us rotating brownouts, why is my Meralco bill so high??? Ok, it's nothing compared to Chuvaness' bill, since mine is around P4.2K only, but hey, for a 2-BR Condo Unit with 1 adult, 2 kids, and a teen, plus the fact that we're hardly home all day... ay-yah!

My friends share the same frustrations. Today, most of their statuses on Facebook are about Meralco and the sky-high rates this month. What's pissy is that we can't even do a single thing about it! I feel like Meralco took advantage of consumers and thought the summer months would be the perfect ploy to cover up the seemingly high increase in generation charge. But hey, there are consumers who constantly estimate their bills, given that they live within a budget, how can you explain a crazy increase when it isn't commensurate to usage?

I also read Chuvaness' other post on this issue - the one where Meralco writes back and tries to explain it's way out of charging her more than double her average bill. So their generation charge went up by almost P1.00, that's approximately 15-20% their previous rate. So why, pray tell, are our bills 100-150% up from usual???

It's crazy, I tell you! CRAZZZZZYYYYYY!!!