Gas Bill Blues

Last week was tough financially.

First, the gas company called and told me how they were going to extra bill me about $120.00 for energy I’d used over the last four years.

"Did I write the wrong amount on the cheques I sent you?" I asked "It’s a long time ago. I can’t remember."

"No, no," the voice on the phone said, assuringly, pleasantly. "You paid everything that was billed to you and you paid it on time, too. It’s just that we figure we didn’t make enough profit during those years so we’re gonna bill you some more."

"Can you do that?" I asked.

"We’re the gas company," the voice on the phone said, chuckling. "We can do whatever we want."

Later that same day I got another phone call from the manager of a restaurant I like to frequent. "You’re one of my best customers and I hate to do this," he said, "but I’ve been going over the receipts from a couple of years ago and I’ve decided I’m going to have to back charge you two bucks for every salad you ordered. As you might remember, the price of lettuce shot up every winter the last few years and the upshot is we just didn’t make what we’d hoped for. So we have to go back and get more money from our customers."

"I ate there a lot over the last three or four years," I said.

"Yeah, I know," he said. "That’s why I’m calling you first."

The day got worse as it progressed. I was besieged by calls from different companies and in each instance they wanted to back charge me for items I’d already bought or consumed years ago.

"If the gas company can do it," one of the callers told me, "then so can I. Two years ago was a bad year. Three years ago was even worse. And don’t even mention last year. What a disaster. So now I’m gonna re-write history. I’m gonna turn those bad times into good times. This is Canada, after all, where everybody is supposed to have good times always."

That night, I filled my car up with gas. I put 20 bucks in it. When I went to pay for it the cashier said, "That’ll be $365.17."

"But I only put 20 dollars in," I protested.

"This time," the cashier said. "But we’re back charging for all the other times, too."

I told her I didn’t have that kind of money on me.

"Leave your wedding ring as a deposit," she suggested, eyeing the plain gold band on my finger. "That’s what everybody else is doing. I’ll give it back to you when you pay up."

Reluctantly, I handed my wedding ring to her and watched as she slipped it into the shirt pocket above her name tag. Then she told me to have a nice day.

As I left the gas station I wondered how I was going to tell Helene that the lady at the gas station had my wedding ring in her shirt pocket. As it turned out, the lady at the grocery store had hers. "They were back charging for all the groceries I already bought years ago," Helene said. "They were doing it to everybody. They had a big box by the door full of wedding rings."

That night, we sat down and started writing cheques.