Disgruntled customers gather at the security window at the Spanish Town office of the JPS on Wednesday morning.
Leonardo Blair, Enterprise Reporter
IT IS Wednesday August 24, 2005. I arrive at the Spanish Town branch of the Jamaica Public Service (JPS) office at approximately 9:45 a.m.
There is a bustling crowd at the security window and a security guard is instructing rapidly. Write your name in the book if your power has been cut; any other queries, take a number.
H13 is my number. The electronic counter on the wall next to a mounted television set displays 73. Power cut customers, the ones who write their names in the big book, get faster attention but the numbers aren't going quickly. At 10:48 a.m. the counter crawled to 81. The security counter is still crowded.
I check, how long? Can I get my name in the book? "No," says the security. "If you go in, they will send you out again. You just have to wait. If you can't wait to see somebody, go over there," she says pointing to a telephone on the wall next to a big sign with the message 'How do you rate our service?'
"I'd rather wait," I tell her. "I want them to show me how they did the math on my light bill this time."
The counter blinks.
"82!" barks the security guard. A woman gets up. I slump in the empty seat. Everyone is talking again. One landlord wants to settle a bill left by absconding tenants. An elderly returning resident complains that this would never happen in the United Kingdom. A small businesswoman is in distress at getting two bills in one month. Her first is for just over $6,000 and the second, due September 5, for over $137,000.
Many customers who took a number with strong determination to wait, limp away in frustration as the day wanes. They have to go back to work. Some mothers decide to take the day off. This is an emergency.
Number 85 has been inside the query cubicle for a while, almost 20 minutes. The lines for bill payment are short. The tellers blink their lights in quick succession, seemingly celebrating the intermittent workload.
HOLD FOR SERVICE
An old man is speaking into the telephone next to the SERVICE sign. It appears that he is being served since he has been standing there for a while until he screams: "All mi ah hear is fi hol' on an' a pure recording mi ah hear inna mi ears. Security mi need fi speak to management because mi pay mi money already!"
He slams the receiver in disgust and shouts across the room. "Mi sick wid mi back," he tells the guard, demanding to speak to someone in person.
But the guard tells him he should have waited on the telephone. He is a power cut customer. He walks back to the security window and tells her: "You can't tell mi say mi never wait! Ah eleven computer record run off inna mi ears." The waiting crowd comes alive with laughter.
She steps back in the office and returns with a white slip of paper with a toll free number written on it. He looks at it and asks: "Wha' mi fi do wid this?"
"Go home and call this number," says the guard.
"You really expect mi fi go back home go siddung inna darkness fi call number whey dem caan answer whole day me a call it yesterday (Tuesday)?" he laments. "Well you have to wait then," says the guard. The crowd grows upset and demands that someone see him. The JPS workers relent and oblige the old man.
The old man is Albert Edward Lawrence. A 70-year-old from Braeton in St. Catherine. "They (JPS) cut off my light about two weeks now," he says. "Mi bill was $4,000 and dem charge mi $1,500 fi connect it. When dem (JPS) come fi put it back (last) Monday night, them tell mi say mi haffi get a 'lectrician fi deal wid it because me never know say a plumber them send."
"The man inside tell me that fi dem duty is only fi connect back the light to the meter and them not responsible fi anything else," says Albert.
The connection to Albert's house was cut in two places, from the light post and the meter.
Other questions about granting more time to pay the bills emerge from the crowd. The guard whispers sympathetically. "If is time you want, them instruct mi to tell you (small window audience) that the company (JPS) is no longer giving time."
Not even if next month is September when school fees are due and you can't explain how you used so much energy this month. But the guard doesn't know how to relay this message without trouble, so she whispers to individuals. The stories are unending. The relations are hostile and everyone is comparing notes that something is amiss.
At 1:00 p.m. my number is called. Lucky 13 I think.
I check with the customer service representative. She knows my face. I had been there twice before and left angry twice before. The first time they insisted my consumption had gone up because their records said so. I told them their records were wrong, protesting there was no recognisable change in my family's consumption habits since last year.
And so I persuaded the supervisor that my meter needed checking. Back in May it was checked and declared defective.
Finally I thought, "victory!" The technicians told me then they had no meters in stock.
I waited confidently for one month and nothing changed except the bill. My KWH usage and charges had more than doubled since 2004. Up from 201 KWH and $2,237.59 in charges last year to 417 KWH in usage and $6,533.32 in charges.
The big increases on my bill came from the increased KWH usage and the fuel and independent power producers (IPP) charge having moved from $4.492 in 2004 to $8.249 per KWH this year.
In July, I had gone back livid. Why have they not changed my meter? Why do you keep sending me bills from a defective meter that you have known about for a month?
"I have no excuse," said the supervisor, promising a meter change. Less than a week later, somewhere in the middle of July, my meter was changed. It looked no different than the first, but I sighed with some relief.
When July's bill came, I could say nothing. The bill was higher, not lower as I had expected. I was tired. I couldn't be bothered. The family split the bill.
Together we paid a bill nearly three times our bill of July 2004. It couldn't go higher. We'll turn off all the lights earlier and watch a little less TV, we thought.
But August was bitter. I got a call on the evening of the 23rd. It was my sister. The latest light bill had arrived. According to JPS, my consumption had tripled to 622 KWH and we now owed the company $9,186.37. Like Denzil Washington's wife in the movie John Q when she thought her son was about to die, my sister had screamed into the telephone: "Do something!"
DO SOMETHING!
So at 1:00 p.m. on August 24, while sitting in a cubicle before the JPS customer service representative, I was thinking 'Do something!' I quietly explained to her again. "Give the figures another look. Something must be wrong."
Again she told me my consumption had gone up. I was silent.
It was during the July meter change that my sister invited the technicians inside our house, having them take a look and make note of the basic appliances we had. It was then, I removed the half scowl from my face, broke out into a half smile, looked her in the eyes and begged.
"Miss, you and I know that this can't be right. Are you telling me I used three months worth of light in one month? Look, something must be wrong."
She paused, stared at her computer screen then told me "Hold on." She had a chat with her supervisor before returning to her seat.
"Okay," she said when she came back. "We will put a hold on your bill until September 2 when our technicians will check your meter again to see if everything is all right. If what we have on record are the number of appliances you have in your house, then this bill looks like a lot," she said.
I thanked her and left the building just before 2:00 p.m. praying my next bill would not be higher.
DwayneKILLICK-CLICK.
That's the last sound Dwayne Lawrence heard from his refrigerator before it sputtered to a useless end months ago. A surge in his electricity supply had hit his refrigerator without warning. In a split moment, his treasured respite from the deadly summer heat was gone. But that was just the beginning of his power troubles.
While his intermittent power supply wreaked havoc on his electrical appliances, he was fighting hard to cope with his 'helter-skelter' light bills. Two months ago, he got a blow. Lights out.
Dwayne is now living in a powerless home and he cannot find the money to reconnect his electricity. Before Hurricane Ivan last year, he could have afforded $1,700 dollars a month for his light bill. But two months ago, he could not pay $6,943.12, so JPS took their power and Dwayne now depends on his mother-in-law. He'd never seen a bill this high before. It is way above his means. "Mi nuh have no light since school lock but mi mother-in-law live near mi so anything mi have fi freeze mi make she freeze that," says Dwayne.
JOANJOAN IS a school janitor. She lives near March Pen Road in Spanish Town, along Windsor Road.
This is Joan's house. A two-bedroom wooden Food For the Poor donation she got last October. It is painted green on the outside and the colour of unpainted wood on the inside. There is Joan's refrigerator, her small AM/FM TV/radio set; just like the ones some taxi driver's perch on their dashboards for passenger entertainment. There are five sodium bulbs in Joan's house. Three for the inside and two for the outside. That, says Joan is her consumption, but see her overdue light bill: more than $35,000. JPS has not come to cut it yet. She says she is not always on time with her bill payments but it should not be this much.
CHARMAINEIT HAPPENED last October when Charmaine Clennon still had her business place in Linstead. The same day she paid her light bill, contract workers came to cut off her light. "When mi drive up to the business place and see the man them a get ready fi cut the light, mi jump outta the van and pull out the bill fi show the man say see it deh. Mi pay the light bill. Him back out a gun pon mi," she says. "Mi report it to the police and the policeman tell mi say from a light business him not touching it."
MRS. MMRS. M. Bellinfante is a small, old woman quietly waiting to help her 83-year-old friend. Her friend is a shut-in with a bill too big for her to pay too. Her friend who lives in Monticello, St. Catherine, has been in the dark for days with no one to watch over her.
ALBERT"You know I can't tell you right now. We are so confused," says Albert Lym, CEO of Brooklyn Supermarket and a businessman for nearly 50 years. "I have been in business so long, but this is the first time I have been so confused. When you think of the light bill, when you have to pay close to $1 million a month and you used to pay $500,000 and $600,000 a month, you understand?
"My house, I only go home at nights and my house bill is $26,000 and last year I used to pay $12,000. I am confused. I don't know where we are going. You can plan today but it doesn't make sense because every day is a new thing. I have been in business for 50 years and I have never seen it like this. I hate to see a young fellow who want to go into business now. The hours are longer and you take home less."
