They get profit sharing checks. Those profit checks go down when the company is less profitable. Those profit checks go to $0 and their paychecks go to $0 when the company is losing money and has to let people go.
Your meter has a sort of odometer for your kWh used. What you could do is just write that down every day at the same time, say 9AM or 9PM if you’re not a morning person. After 7 days you should have a pretty good approximation of your daily average. Take that average x 30, is that closer to 500 kWh or closer to what SDGE is billing you?
When booking award travel, confirm your credit card gets charged immediately
My specific problem was that I had booked an itinerary that included a CopaAir flight through United MileagePlus, and the CopaAir portion went from “ticketing in progress” state to being dropped from the itinerary completely.
Turns out that my credit card wasn’t working for some reason, so United’s credit department was basically blocking the ticketing of my trip. The solution was to try a different credit card and confirm the charges went through. After that not only did it show up as ticketed in United, but it also showed up as ticketed in CopaAir and I was able to select seats on the CopaAir website.
What made this difficult to solve was poor communication between United departments, CopaAir, and with me. There was zero proactive communication that there was an issue, not even an email telling me the CopaAir flight had been dropped. I was lucky I had checked on the itinerary a few days later. In addition, the second time I called United, the agent wasn’t aware of the credit card being a problem and so they told me the issue was likely not enough award seats on the CopaAir flight and to call CopaAir to confirm seat availability. My first call to CopaAir was not very helpful, the CA agent just kept telling me the reservation had expired, but not why it had expired, nor whether there were award seats. The third time I called United, the agent just re-added the CopaAir flight only to have it be dropped again a few days later. In my second call to CopaAir, the agent provided more information, which was helpful: the reservation was being cancelled because the third-party booker (United) needed to pay for the ticket within 24 hours and they were not doing that, so the reservation expired. Finally, in my fourth call to United, the agent took the time to call one or two different departments, including the credit department, discovered they were not completing ticketing because of an issue with my credit card, and said that we could try the credit card again but he couldn’t guarantee it would work. I suggested using a different credit card, a United MileagePlus Explorer card, he said he could do that. When we tried the Explorer card, I saw the pending charge happen immediately, something that had not happened with any of the previous calls, and the ticketing completed within an hour or so. The agent spent 2 hours on this final call with me, and although that is a significant amount of both of our time, I was grateful to finally have all flights ticketed, and at a cheaper rate than if I had paid cash.
So when booking award travel, make sure you see the expected charges (taxes/fees) hit your credit card within 24 hours of booking your flight. If you don’t, there might be an issue with the credit card you gave the airline.
Too real.
I was traveling back into the US by car after vacationing with family in Mexico. I was arrested at the border by the US CBP. Almost a dozen officers pointing their guns at my car. They handcuffed me and took me to a detention center. A big room with a metal bench lining the while. My ankle was shackled to the bench. They held me there for 4 hours. Had to use the bathroom with cameras on me. The room filled up with a couple dozen people. There was a 12 year old kid next to me, also shackled to the bench. There were mothers with babies. The USCBP officers cracked jokes like "welcome to the party" in reference to the large number of people in the room. I was terrified because they told me nothing and I had no idea how long they were going to keep me there. At one point they talked about moving people to another detention center, and I was worried I would be one of those people. The rest of my family had entered the US already and had no idea I had been arrested, they thought I was on my way home.
I filed a redress with US DHS. The response I got back was that they couldn't tell me why I was arrested. Reached out to my US representatives, response was basically that US CBP has "wide latitude" to do what they want.