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Saturday, April 25, 2015

STUPID TORONTO UTILITY BILLING


 THE BILLING IS DEMENTED FOR A REASON

There's a faithful saying that goes this way. "Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad."
In Toronto, there's one quick path to going mad, and that is trying to make sense out of the city's utility bill.
It is so convoluted and mystifying that it is almost comic satire. I just know that if there was still a practical solid city treasurer around like William Campbell, who bizarrely was the grandfather of that clown Rob Ford, he would have eviscerated with his common sense the creators of the modern bill for water supply, sewers and the system of bins and arcane rules that has turned us all into garbage pickers.
My latest bill has 31 numerical listings on it,  like 0.613698630, which I guess is supposed to impress me about how far the bureaucrats have gone in precise calculations, but the result really resembles in the end the scrawls of a door-to-door salesman who is trying to rent you one of those water heaters at an exorbitant price.
And if that doesn't paint the picture for you, it resembles the product of a council of 44 men and women whom you and I wouldn't trust to buy our groceries.
They have certainly achieved their hidden goal, to so confuse us as to what our utilities really cost, we won't question just why they cost so much.
If someone from another city were to ask what I pay for these services and bins, I would have to confess I have no idea. All I know is that the charges go up every year, the privatized collection service works well most of the time,  and the numbers that are blitzed at us with every bill continue to be as baffling as the thought that we actually need 44 councillor and one mayor (doing his best to be all things to all activists)  to run this place in such a costly way.
No, I won't saying it was better in the old days because then we had more of those city workers pretending to work as hard as they did at election time in support of the councillors that they had conned into caring more about them than the taxpayers.
I threw the utility bill into the garbage. Probably in the wrong bin but even petty revenge is sweet.

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