With all the small contretemps of the last few days I think I’ve forgotten to mention one of the bigger ones. As I keep saying, there is nothing like moving to a new country to show you how ignorant you really are.
Since we’ve lived in this apartment, as you might expect, we’ve received a bit of mail for the owner, who used to live here. The company pays the rent for us, and everything (utilities and such) is handled through a rental agency – they pay bills and bill our company. Some of the mail for the owner is clearly minor stuff – frequent flyer programs and so on. Not wanting to read someone else’s mail, we tossed it in the recuycle bin, except for a few letters that were clearly important, which we did open. (For instance, one from the water company required us to figure out how to read the meter here.)
You have probably guessed why this was a bad policy. Tuesday we received a notice (fortunately this time NOT in an envelope) that my Dutch was just barely good enough to decipher, saying that our heat or electric service would be turned off due to nonpayment. Fortunately the phone number it gave was available until 8PM (even lots of important services only run until 6 here) so I called, and the woman was fairly helpful. I explained the situation; she looked it up and found there was a contract for heating only for this apartment (thank goodness; if they did shut it off we can manage without heat, this time of year, but not without electricity for long). She also said the whole thing was odd, as they’re legally not allowed to turn off the heat. SHe also said they’d visited the owner on May 23 which is equally baffling: if they did see him, why didn’t he do something? If they came here, which was the address they had, they wouldn’t have seen anyone, so why didn’t they report that?
I took the bill in to the person at work who deals with these first, first thing in the morning, and it turned out the mistake wasn’t ours; in fact the bills should have gone to the owner or the rental company to be handled directly, so I feel a little better. But from now I’m turning in everything that I can’t identify.
There was another scary moment when we came home yesterday and Rudder turned on the TV to find no cable service, but fortunately that was wroking half an hour later. We mostly plan to veg this weekend, and while I can happily do that with no TV, for him it’s the easiest way to turn off the brain.