Jazz

CW: animal death

Also, if they already pulled a ridiculous amount of money from you… if you believe that the charges are for power that you did not use you likely can file a dispute with your bank.  If you lost power tell them about that and say that services were not received, or if there are sudden new previously not disclosed fees you can state that the price is different than disclosed. Those sorts of reasons should keep banking systems from messing with the account itself, as it would do for a fraud claim.  Filing a dispute against your power company might not get you your money back, but it MAY.  It may also allow the bank to waive a stop payment fee if you fear a second round of hiked rates.  Just ask the banker about that before filing the stop paymen as some systems will ONLY waive the fee if it’s done DURING the dispute process…. 

But!  You have to remember that the stop payment is there until YOU remove it.  While some banks may remove them after 6 months, or 1-5 years…. it will be your responsibility to remember to reestablish your payment relationship with the power company, and you’ll also then need to let your bank about it when you want to start allowing payments to process again so they can remove the block.

And for those worried that it might somehow look shady: No, the banker will NOT think you’re trying to pull a fast one.  The banker is 10000% likely to be on your side when you explain the situation and ask them questions. 

Day 22+23

If you follow me, you’ll for sure be tired of hearing this, but I can’t help it. If we let them, Texas leadership will let the media narrative be “oopsie, that storm sure caused a state of emergency that Texas couldn’t withstand 🤷‍♀️😅”

The truth is:

1. ERCOT chose profits and cost cutting over properly winterizing our grid. A similar (much less devastating) thing happened in 2011 and they rolled the dice betting on profits over people. The freak storm this week came and the people lost the bet.

2. Because the grid got TAXED by the extreme cold weather, it couldn’t keep up having not been winterized. So millions of people lost power in said extremely cold weather. Without the heat in their homes to help keep the environment warmer, pipes froze and burst all in residences over the state. Also, those of us with heat were dripping our faucets to try to keep our pipes from freezing too (many did anyway.)

3. This led to a handful of days where we used 250% of the normal water consumption level (according to Austin Water at least, most of it wastes by main breaks.) So that critically depleted our potable water supply and then water was shut off to many locations to help manage the supply. Everywhere, a boil notice went into effect bc the water that is available is not fully clean.

ERCOT answers to Governor Abbott exclusively. It is a direct line from Abbott->ERCOT->Power outages->Broken pipes->Humanitarian crisis.

– Ogden Nash ↳ for @leftpawedpolarbear

“Give your sisters all my love”