The Ministry of Electricity

Ironically, over the past couple of months I've had to deal with a little more of the harshness of the Vietnamese system now that I live in a (relatively) expensive apartment. It's because I now pay, in addition to the usual monthly rent, 6 monthly bills that used to be included with renting a furnished room in a serviced building: parking, water, electricity, maid, cable TV, and internet. It makes me sometimes pine for the simplicity of paying one person a fixed amount each month and not not worrying about anything else.

For the most part, paying these other bills has not been an imposition as they are all payable in person in the lobby of the building each month. One has only to keep one's eyes on the notices posted in the elevators about when representatives from the various service providers will be present and to check one's lobby mailbox periodically for the bills.

I'm fairly organised about these things and haven't had any problems paying any of the bills with the notable exception of the electricity bill which the local power company which I will now refer to as  the Ministry of Electricty (MoE) began refusing payment for. That's right, they stopped accepting my payments!

It all began about 3 weeks after I moved in here with a knock on the door by 3 uniformed representatives of the MoE who motioned for me to follow them to the utility room down the hall and to gaze upon the brand new meter they had just installed and its reading of a string of half a dozen zeroes and to sign a form acknowledging my acceptance of its installation. One of the reps informed me that my electricity that month would be free because the previous meter was broken. Somehow I knew that wouldn't be the end of it.

Once you've been in Vietnam for a while you learn that those types of things rarely or never happen here.
Things seemed OK for about 2 months. I would receive the bill from the MoE and pay it in the lobby. I've only been paying about $6-7 US per month for power because of my infrequent use of the air conditioner and the fact that I've adapted to living without hot water and the low cost of power here. 1 kwh runs only 6 cents US at the lowest level and climbs modestly from there.

The living without hot water is a fact of life for many Vietnamese and many residences have only a water heater, often installed retroactively, for the shower and nothing else. This is also still true of many of the hotels in Vietnam.  I started taking cold showers just as a relief from the heat and humidity and while I still occasionally enjoy a hot shower when available, now find a cold shower welcomingly refreshing. Since moving into this apartment over 5 months ago I've never turned on the hot water heater even though it would give me central hot water. I've also found that washing dishes and shaving with hot water, while nice, is completely unnecessary.  The idea of life without hot water is probably a bit terrifying to most Westerners and it would have been to me too, but believe me, you can easily get used to it in Saigon. I never even give it a thought anymore.

Then one day I received a yellow notice from the MoE, all in Vietnamese, regarding a problem with my account and an unpaid balance that amounted to over 6 months of my typical electricity usage.  Well, it's not actually my account, but is in the name of the landlord. That's the way it's done here and I agreed to pay the balances beginning when I moved in.

My discussions with the receptionist regarding the matter got me nowhere except he seemed to indicate that I needn't worry too much about it. Additionally I received my monthly bill from the MoE that looked normal. The next time I attempted to pay the MoE rep in the lobby he gave me the little sideways wave of the hand accompanied by a "không được" ("no can do"). This gesture and the remark are 2 things about Vietnam I will not miss as I've seen and heard them more than enough times for this lifetime.  The receptionist could only tell me there was a problem with the bill and I needed to talk to my landlord about it. Another thing about living in Vietnam : never expect a clear honest explanation of any problem.

I continued to get delinquent account notices along with the threat of cutting off my power. "They wouldn't really do that", I thought to myself. After all, I've been dutifully paying (or at least trying!) all my bills since living here and how ridiculous would it be to cut off the power to a unit in this modern high-rise that bills itself as "Possibly the best address in Vietnam" (PTBAIVN).

Soon I found out why that was qualified with "Possibly". The power often goes off around Saigon and for
some this can mean many hours without power. It's usually an intended outage because the power demands exceed the grid. Ironically (again) at PTBAIVN there's a back-up power system and it's one of the really nice advantages to living here. When the power goes off the back-up system kicks in in less than 1 minute.  Except this time it didn't. I glanced at my door and could see the lights in the hallway were on. But not mine. "No f*&^@$ way" , I thought to myself. I opened my door to find the pink cut-off notice the MoE man had stuck there before proceeding to carry out his responsibility without bothering to even knock on my door first.

I stormed downstairs and the receptionist was able to get my power restored. Again no reasonable explanation was offered as to why the MoE had decided that I owed the large unpaid balance.  I'm just glad I was here when the power was cut for had I been traveling I would have come home to no power and a refrigerator full of rotten dairy products. Lovely.

I had already figured out what was most likely going on. I knew it was related to the MoE's broken meter and that someone there was either misinformed about what had happened or was simply attempting to extort money out of someone because of THEIR broken meter.


The PTBAIVN receptionist did contact my landlord for me and she promised to try to straighten the matter out.

About a week later the landlord called to say she was dropping by. She had in fact visited the MoE and had obtained the power usage records for the previous year for my unit. She showed me the readings from before I moved in and they were 3-4 times what the readings were after I had moved it. Apparently the previous tenant couldn't live without hot water and air conditioning to the degree I could! Between the 2 starkly different sets of numbers were 2 zeroes indicating the 2 months during which the MoE's meter was broken.

The first thing the landlord tried to do was tell me that my power usage was higher than what the meter readings were and that I simply owed more! I wasn't too happy with this explanation for the many obvious reasons and informed her that I would not be paying the MoE any extra than what the meter said I owed. She finally called the MoE and confirmed to me what I had been suspecting : the MoE had decided that it was going to collect for the 2 months during which their meter was broken and they had arrived at the unpaid balance by extrapolating the power usage in the months leading up to the broken meter. They no doubt thought of themselves as exceedingly clever for doing this. The truth is that the MoE really lost almost nothing due to their broken meter because the unit was unoccupied for most of that time but to them it was really simple : someone pays the balance we dreamed up or we cut the power.

In the US and most other first world nations, if a business's meter is broken, tough crap, the business doesn't collect any revenue. And when it comes to services that are essential such as electricity there are procedures and protections in place for the consumer. None of that exists here at least not to my knowledge.

I believe the landlord finally straightened the matter out but it left a really bad taste in my mouth.  No one gave a damn about the fact that I was living here when the MoE cut the power and it was only by pushing back hard that I got the landlord to go to bat for me to get the MoE off my back.

There was later an issue with the payment of the service charge for my apartment and this time it was the staff of PTBAIVN that began sending me notices that they were going to (can you guess it?) cut off all the services to my apartment! This culminated in 2 of them knocking on my door (at least they had the courage and decency to do that) and telling me I needed to contact my landlord to resolve the matter. The landlord had already informed me that she had paid the service charge and being really tired of being the victimised go-between, I told the PTBAIVN lady to wait while I called the landlord on my phone and handed it to her.  After a brief conversation it was apparently resolved.

This month has been peaceful so far but can it last?  Is this really PTBAIVN?

On another note, it's commonly known throughout southeast Asia that many of the local women are interested in foreign men only for the upgrade in lifestyle it might afford them (and their family, and their village....). While this is certainly true there are also many exceptions.  But what I had not heard of was what do foreign women deal with if they become involved with a local man? Of course this a far rarer occurrence than the converse (no, I won't open that can of worms any further), but I recently met a European woman who works here as an airline pilot who has been involved in a tortuous relationship with a Vietnamese man for far longer than she would like to admit. And guess what? He constantly hits her up for money for both himself and his family! And she's been stupid enough to fork it over and not a small amount either. Let's just say that before he hooked up with a foreign woman, there was no property in the Vietnamese man's family, but now they are landed.  The woman is very nice, but honestly she doesn't have the looks that will get her many prospects and by her own admission she's very needy and keeps the relationship going even though she knows it's not healthy for her in the long term.  It sounds depressingly familiar.

One nice effect of the rain is that it clears the air. After a good storm I can see Núi Ba đen (black lady mountain) from my window over 100 km away.