The Power Game

On October 18th, I wrote about the adventure of paying my power bill in China. You can read that post here. Without getting into how difficult it was to pay, here is a recap of the money portion of it.

The picture above was taken on October 18, 2016. Those numbers are the amount of money that I had on the meter. In US dollars that is close to $75. Many people asked me how long I expected $75 to last, but I had no way of knowing at the time. My guess was that we were good to go for about a month.

I checked that meter every week for the next month because I didn't want it to run out and have our power shut off, but I soon quit checking because it moved slower than a stoned sloth on Ambien. I didn't look at it again until the beginning of May when we started using our air conditioner because the temperature hit nearly 100.

Once the air was on, it started moving (although slowly) and it got down to 125¥ about two weeks ago. That means it took seven months for us to use just under 400¥. For those of you playing at home, that is less than $60 for seven months of electricity usage. That averages out to less than $10 per month. It was under $4 when we weren't using the air conditioner.

I can't help but wonder why I always paid at least $300 every month for the same service when I lived in the States. I have a theory, but it's rather controversial and involves Kathy Griffin devouring the gall bladders of lab-grown goat embryos provided by the Illuminati to finance a third Paul Blart movie. I try not to get political here, so I won't get into details.

In the meantime, as the city outside is melting, I have no reservations about cranking the A/C up high enough to have icicles forming on our shower curtain rod since the monthly expense is less than a couple of Big Macs.