Spin Me Round Like A Record

Yesterday I went down to the manager’s office, full of rage and indignation and met the new apartment manager for the first time. Holy fuck was she hot. She had long chestnut hair, full lips and these wide disbelieving eyes when I told her about my electric bill. She instantly adopted a pleasing “how can I possibly help you attitude” that bordered on frantic. I’m angry and pissed off but shit, my brain was cycling through porn plots of how she could REALLY make it up to me.

Superhot Manager luckily was not overcome with lust like I was and she called up the power company. She ripped through several layers of bureaucracy in no time and talked to someone semi-important. Here is where it gets surreal.

The power company let us know that they really are only in charge of the meter. There’s another power company that does the actual electrical stuff. Apparently the people that send us our bill are subcontractors who’s jobs are to look at a meter and write the number down. On occasion they replace a meter. She offered to send me a brochure and advised me to keep my air conditioning at 80 degrees. That’s it. Oh and she informed us that meters last ‘a hundred years’ and I got a little distracted by the thought of Georgia Power around 1906.

Well Superhot Manager hung up on them and vowed she would send maintenance over to my apartment to check the air conditioning. I thanked her and she asked for my phone number. I was assaulted by more porn plots before realizing she just wanted to call me if the power company stopped being assholes.

Keep in mind I also have my work from home job which requires my absolute attention and this is a busy week. So all day consisted of guys stomping through my apartment to look over everything while I tried to squeeze work in. It’s literally me answering a question from the electrician, watching him leave, run over to my computer and crank out some work, then stop when he gets back to answer more questions about how often I do laundry.

Eventually they show me where the meter is. I’m looking at a bank of power meters and they are all slowly cranking at celestial speeds except for this one that is spinning like a damn record. That one is ours. We shut off all the breakers and our meter stopped cold, which was proof that we weren’t being siphoned from some other apartment. I can’t tell you how disappointing that was.

The electricians left without figuring anything out and I went back to work from 5 to 8 to catch up on stuff. My brilliant wife gets home and listens to the whole story. She then asks “Why didn’t you turn the breakers off one at a time to see what was causing the biggest drain?”

I think my answer was something like, “Did you know our apartment manager was hot?”

At nine at night, I’m standing outside watching the meter. It does a full revolution every six seconds. My wife turns off the air conditioning breaker and it barely slows down. She turns off the kitchen, the bedrooms and the living room, nothing. Then she turns everything back on and turned off the water heater breaker. I watch out spinning wheel drop back down into reality. Now the meter does a full revolution every 49 seconds. Damn. The water heater had jacked our usage up what? Ten times? We shut the water heater off.

So here it is in the morning. We can’t take a shower cause fuck, that water’s cold. I need to go chat to Superhot Manager and tell her it was the apartment’s water heater and I don’t think we should have to pay for that, especially since we complained that something was up last month. I am hoping she stays her really nice self and agrees. Just because she’s hot doesn’t mean I can’t be a total asshole about this. Hell, it might even help.

Plus I still have work from yesterday to catch up on and work to do today. If anyone has the ability to clone people, now is the time to let me borrow it.