Welcome home....

So when I arrived home from work today this was stuck just outside our doorway...
It's a little hard to see, so I got you a close up view too...
Yep, it's our electricity bill. Normally they just deduct what ever they feel we used every month from a bank account that our landlord set up for us. I'd like to say that it's based on meter readings but the amounts vary too wildly for me to correlate them to our actual electrical usage, although we did see a spike when we bought our heater last year - maybe Tina uses it more then she lets on....

The landlord set up the electrical account when we first moved in last August, and then when we were out of town in September he realized that we would also have to pay the water and bills, and quickly set up a second account for us. He couldn't add it to the original account because we had the card and he hadn't bothered to keep any of the account information or something, it could just be that without the ATM card he couldn't give the water company permission to automatically deduct from that account.

So anyway, we've had this happen before - the notice that lets all your neighbors know that you are delinquent in payment. Last time we worried and tried to figure out how to pay the electric bill directly and were finally told - "Just put the money in the account, they'll take it next month then, don't worry about it." We put money into the account and after a second warning letter they pulled the fee from our account.

We had been better after that, but my sudden two week stint in Taiwan meant that we didn't get a chance to get to the bank and make sure that accounts had enough money in them to cover any bills. We just went this last weekend, everything looked fine and we added some cash to cover the next payment. The bill left on the door read 03-11, which means they attempted to deduct 2 week ago and are just bothering to tell us now.

I think that are really trusting to some degree, we talked to another foreigner that didn't get a gas bill for the 3 years he was living in an apartment and that caused some issues when they suddenly wanted to collect when he was moving out.

Ah, but all is good - no worries this time, we know that we will get another warning before they bother to look in the bank, and for the time being (until they clean the hallways) there will be a nice reminder that we are bad people who were behind on one of our payments....
The first time I went out with a razor blade to clean in and feel good about ourselves. The second notice I left remnants - they were there for a few weeks. We will have to wait and see how long this one remains.