A year ago, my family made the difficult decision to leave our home in the Mississippi Delta to take advantage of a great job opportunity in Kansas.
We put our home in Indianola on the market, and by Christmas, the house was empty and we had completely relocated from Sunflower County to the Sunflower State.
My wife and I make a good living for our family of five, but we don't exactly make second home money.
It costs a lot of money just to maintain an empty home in hopes of it selling, but it's also no secret that the Delta has a rather depressed housing market, which has made the process difficult.
Compounding that problem has been our experience with Entergy Mississippi.
At first, the monthly electric bills weren't bad. We knew we were going to have to pay a minimum bill to keep the lights on. That wasn't an issue.
By summer, though, the bills started to escalate.
When I called Entergy, they explained that several months bills were past due. I took them at their word and set up a payment plan to catch up.
That night, my wife informed me that she indeed had been paying the bills and that she had receipts to prove it.
Still, I felt that our house would sell soon and we'd all be whole at the end of the day.
Then the house didn't sell, and the bills started getting higher. We're talking between $500 and $600 a month. That didn't seem right. The house was empty and idling as far as electricity was concerned.
All the while, my energy bills in Kansas, where five people are pulling resources inside a home, averaged half those amounts.
After months of these type bills, I called back and spoke to a representative. Through the initial call, we discovered that Entergy had assessed that our home had used more wattage empty this year than it had used with five people pulling resources the same month a year ago.
That definitely didn't seem right.
The first Entergy representative was kind and seemed empathetic, although she quickly deferred to a "supervisor."
The supervisor was much better trained on how to be rude, standoffish and not empathetic to situations like this.
I asked her how she would react if she had a second home that was empty and she received a bill claiming that she used more electricity vacant than when it was occupied with multiple tenants.
Her answer: I would first go through the home and make sure nothing new is running that wasn't running prior to the billing cycle.
My answer: Unless Dr. Frankenstein relocated his laboratory to my sunroom in my absence, nothing new should be plugged up inside that house. Nothing new was plugged in, by the way.
She rejected that reasoning and was unrelenting that somehow, some way, the empty home is using more electricity than last year.
After 10 minutes of going round and round, I told her that I had the bill that showed an empty house using more electricity empty than full and that I was going to file a complaint with the Mississippi Public Service Commission, which I did that day.
I don't expect much from PSC, since they don't push back against allowing Entergy's important customers, data centers, to produce electricity with little to no transparency.
Nor do I expect Entergy to try to make this right or even a C-suite type to call me and Entergysplain about how bills are not really measured by usage after all.
But in case they do want to talk, they can reach me at 662-571-6226 or at bryank43@hotmail.com.
Bryan Davis is former publisher of the Indianola Enterprise-Tocsin.
