Ecuador may be considered a country that is still developing
modern conveniences. One of these conveniences is the platform for online bill
pay. Most people still pay their bills here in cash and in person. Heading down
to the ServiPagos office once a month to pay your electricity and phone bill is
common practice and a standard service offered by messengers and empleadas. But
this is not convenient because even just withdrawing your own cash out of an
ATM to give to the messenger to pay your bills is at times a multi-step
process. You are only allowed to withdraw $100 at a time from an ATM, and the
government imposes a daily limit of $200 cash withdraws. So for these reasons
I’ve attempted to pay most of our bills online. This is handled directly
through our bank account, which is already connected to basic service
providers.
However, when our bank remodeled their website a couple
weeks ago, things went awry. I attempted several times to pay our electric bill
online, and I kept receiving an error message that the balance paid had to be
greater than zero. “Huh,” I thought to myself, “I guess I already paid it and
just forgot to write it down.” Wrong. This error message was due to the website
not being compatible with Google Chrome (a fact I figured out later) and the
bill had not, in fact been paid.
Imagine my confusion when I got home from work on Thursday
night to a dark house. I angrily blamed the construction crews working across
the street day in and day out. They must have cut a line or downed a
transformer. What nerve! Never had I imagined that the power had actually been
shut off. After all, the due date was a mere three days prior. Of course they
couldn’t shut it off that quickly. In the US, you can go months without paying
your electric before they shut it off. The electric company can’t have people
freezing to death on them, now can they?
Lesson learned: Ecuador does not play around with prissy
little “grace periods.” You pay your bills, or you get shut down. Like,
immediately. Now I know.
I was taken back to our first weeks in Ecuador when we had
no hot water and had to take cold sponge baths and then scurry into bed into
layers of blankets, teeth chattering. As the sun began to quickly set, I
rounded up all the candles I could find and put on an extra pair of sweat pants
and thick socks to brace for the arctic 60 below temps. “Justin,” I squeaked
under blankets and with a scratchy voice, as I was right in the middle of a
nasty chest cold. “I think I didn’t pay the power bill.” “Okay” he said. “I
tried to do it a couple of times online and it just kept giving me an error
message and then I just forgot about it,” I explained. “And we can’t get online
to pay it now because our Wi-Fi is out and we have no saldo and also both our
cell phones are almost dead,” he added. I nodded pathetically.
So in typical hero fashion, Justin dashed up to the school
to logon to their computers and try to get our bill paid. Fortunately, the
school pays their electric bill regularly. And though he was able to finally
get a successful transaction, we were still without power for the rest of the
night and the next morning. Justin arrived back from basketball a couple hours
later to a dark house and me straining to read by candlelight. I told him I was
dying for a cup of hot tea but since the stove couldn’t function without electric
either I was out of luck. “I can grill
it!” he said, “The grill is gas; I can put it on the grill.” I thought this was
hilarious and a bit ridiculous but was desperately wanting some hot liquids. So
sure enough, Justin went out onto the porch in the pitch black night and
without the glow of his cell phone to light his way, he fixed me a kettle of
piping hot tea on the gas grill. And he never once gave me a hard time about
forgetting to pay the electric. That my friends, is love.
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