The excessive increase in my electricity bill represents nothing compared to the 14 000 pesos in the monthly bill of a young woman who lamented after not having found a solution, not even a convincing answer, in the Office of Attention to the Population of the South Commercial Unit of the Electric Power Plant, in the municipality of Morón.

Do you have an industry in your house or are you paying the bills of the clients of the community? She, understanding my black humor, tells me that she has the necessary items and only one air conditioner, “but my neighbor has two and that month she paid 1,500 pesos; also, I use liquefied gas for cooking.”

My situation is not significant either compared to the more than a thousand pesos that that elderly woman, of advanced age, had to pay, whose only support was a grandson who had just left the country. Now she is forced to sell her assets to pay a dubious bill, inconsistent with the amount of household appliances, the cohabitants in the home and traditional consumption.

Nearby, another woman alleges that historically she has complained of paying excessive bills of up to 4,000 pesos, without having air conditioning or other appliances that use a lot of energy. She is outraged and has returned, at least, for a logical explanation, because the solution has never come.

Stories from the queue and from the neighborhood reveal dissatisfaction that did not occur after the increase in payment rates, after the implementation of the Ordering Task, when it was insisted that the increase in costs should be proportional to the quality of services.

The circumstances speak of inconsistencies and the persistence of problems, whose solution does not depend, in most cases, on the availability of resources, but on the willingness to offer a service that meets the requirements, including professional skills and abilities. Capabilities to offer an answer when working in a customer service bureau.

The responses of an institutional or public official, facing the people, irritate me and I resist continuing to listen to her. Although I break the most elementary rules of formal education, I interrupt him, I refute his arguments because they are not logical or convincing, I ask him for sensitivity and understanding, but he does not seem to understand these issues.

“The Company is not interested in the fact that you and your family have been away from home for half the month for being hospitalized with Covid-19. Can you imagine that we have to investigate such situations? There are more than 12 000 clients in this area”, he declared.

I took a deep breath and continued the discussion. It was logical that this could not constitute evidence; I only appealed to your understanding and tried to show you that there was a problem with my monthly account.

So I made another argument: during the month of July, the Electricity Company in the territory of Morón, faced with the complex epidemiological situation, decided not to read the meters and made the payment based on the historical average of consumption, which caused many customers get a receipt with a payment figure, obviously, above what they could afford.

That was also my case and I showed it to him by explaining the equipment I have in my home, I talked to him about our daily routines and showed the payment tickets from previous months, where a stability in consumption is evidenced.

The official made some inquiries in the automated system and then replied: "What I can do for you is readjust the month of July" (the historical average of consumption). He made me sign a paper to make the request for a rate reduction and assured me that the amount to be paid would decrease significantly.

When the historical average of consumption exceeds the monthly expense, the logic indicates that when a new reading is made, this will have a favorable impact for the client in the next payment. Therefore, it must have been with me.

"And why didn't the Company take care of the readjustment, would it have saved me the hassle of coming here and standing in line in the middle of the pandemic?" I asked him. I almost died with the answer, thank goodness that that morning I had taken my antihypertensive:

“Imagine, I already told you, the company has more than 12 000 clients in the area and we are few workers here, and we were closed for a good time due to Covid, we could not take care of that. Now we open and people who are dissatisfied can come to complain, "he answered, clear and blunt.

I could not contain myself and, without wanting to insult or prosecute, I told him: “It is absurd, many people, in the midst of this epidemiological situation, will refrain from coming to complain, even if they wanted to, and the lack of personnel is not a concern of consumers. We pay for a service and we have the right to have it offered with quality and to be respected.”

I let him know that those were unfair and brutal procedures, and that the company did not have a conception of what customer or population service was. An extremely sensitive issue, which the main leaders of the country advocate on a daily basis, however , here they do not seem to have been listened to and ignore the laws for the protection of consumer rights.

Nevertheless, that issue of the quality of services and the concepts that as a company have about customer service, as he let me know, are not matters that he attends there, therefore, I had to address the municipal Electric Company. Maybe I was a bit disrespectful, but I only managed to tell him: "Such a schematic person is not the appropriate one to serve the population." However, I thanked him for his management before leaving.

And I left, without being able to stop thinking about the fate of the other more than 11,999 clients of that entity who, for various reasons, will not come to know that they were victims of inadequate procedures, of obstacles, of bungling, of those misconceptions about what customers, consumers, users or the population mean, the Electric Company said in the legal terms most used to classify those who use a service offered by a borrower.

I also left, worried about the fate of that girl with her account of 14 000 pesos and the old woman who sold her belongings to pay the expenses of the month.

Besides, I preferred to leave with other questions: why have electricity bills been so high in months with so many interruptions in service? Does consumption increase with "blackouts"? This is another concern given the excessive increase in electricity rates in recent months.

I left with the desire to ask when the quality of the electrical service in my neighborhood, of the Popular Council Patria, in Morón, will correspond to the fees we pay and we will get rid of the shock caused by the ups and downs in voltage.

When will we stop putting our hands to our heads and begging that the refrigerator or other household appliances have not been broken, since most do not have freely convertible currency (MLC) to replace it? How many more times will it be necessary to report the same problems and the definitive solution will arrive for the “fireworks” that light up the nights in my neighborhood from one of the electric poles?

There is always someone more screwed up than me (us), as an old neighbor used to say. I cannot erase from my mind the young woman with the account of 14 000 pesos, nor the old woman who sells her belongings to pay the debt.

It is impossible to stop worrying about so much lack of sensitivity and inconsistencies with the procedures, laws and daily demands of a country to improve the quality of services, including attention to the concerns of the people.