For the past 23 years, I have lived full-time on Shandelee, in the house my father bought as a vacation home in the 1940s. For more than half of those years, my electric bill stayed pretty much the same, between $45 and $50 a month. I have been a widow for almost 30 years, live alone and get by on social security and not much more. For many years, I had the company of a cat or two but they don’t use any electricity. They don’t need lights – they see in the dark much better than we humans do.

My sons come to visit and help out when they can, but rarely stay longer than a day or two at most. Some years ago, we all got a significant increase in our electric bills, with mine going to $80 or $90 a month. We were told it had to do with the cost of producing electricity, which had shot up. I grumbled, but had to suck it up and pay. We all did. We are all electricity-dependent.

In February, however, when I opened my NYSEG bill, I nearly fainted. I was looking at a charge of almost $300! Nothing had changed. I heat my house with oil and cook on a gas stove. I called NYSEG immediately, saying that the bill must be a mistake. The person I spoke with sounded helpful enough, but said all he could do was stop my automatic payment for the month while my problem was investigated.

The result: just about nothing! They would let me pay the charge off in two months rather than all at once. But this bill cannot possibly be correct. Either the meter, which they are planning to replace, had gone berserk or the meter reader was drunk. If neither of these were the case, then there is only one other alternative, worse still. Could NYSEG have deliberately falsified thousands of bills simply to get a revenue bump before the new electronic meters are installed? I would hate to think that was the case.

I’m sure many of you reading this suffered the same shock. If so, we need to speak up. Complain to your legislators and congressmen. We have to fight to keep the little guy from being trampled upon. Billionaires in our country don’t worry about their electric bills, but the rest of us certainly do.

Marge Feuerstein is a Manor Ink mentor and its town and school board meetings reporter.