I don’t doubt that what you say is true.
I guess I expect too much from the world. I don’t expect too much from this woman, but I’d like to think that the professionals who work at the Water department would be able to figure out that something must be wrong if one household has a bill this astronomical. But no, they are happy to ask the woman to pay thousands of dollars that she legitimately does not, or should not, owe.
You know, I’m pretty smart and I make a decent wage, and I find some of the people you encounter in these places impossible to deal with. And I often wonder about those who do not have the intellectual, or language, skills that I have.
What happens to those people? I wonder.
Well, this article shows one example of what can happen.
This woman might be stupid, lazy, self-indulgent and have a million other failings. That doesn’t mean it’s OK to rip her off.
“This woman might be stupid, lazy, self-indulgent and have a million other failings. That doesn’t mean it’s OK to rip her off.”
I’d’ really like to see a breakdown of that water bill. Certainly, a lot of that bill is a subsidy for OTHER non-paying customers and also for the bad planning of Detroit, in trying to maintain water for 700,000 people in a distribution system designed to handle two million. This is clearly NOT her responsibility.
Speaking of “not her responsibility”, I pay a rather high water bill in an area blessed with torrents of fresh, clean water. I live in a new subdivision with very considerable state-of-the-art water and sewage infrastructure that was built into the (high) cost of my home. I am paying (by EPA mandate, by the way) to upgrade the older, poorer parts of the city that the city didn’t maintain and the citizens didn’t spend any money on for 75 years.
I had a problem with my water bill about three months ago. In one month, it jumped over $100. I shut off everything in the house (water wise) and went outside to look at the meter (it has a small red dial that reads in very fine increments of flow). Dead stopped cold.
I wrote down the reading and went back in to call the WD. Got the usual questions about recent work in the yard, etc. and then got to looking at the bill. The meter reader was off by one number in the second most significant place.
They had a supervisor come out and reread the meter and confirmed the reading and readjusted the bill.
All of this took 1/2 hour of my time and a telephone.
The fact is this woman is existing solely on probably about 5 entitlement and giveaway programs and she likely didn’t even look at her damned water bills until they shut the water off. She just never cared about it.