Barbados Life: If You Need to Pay Your Power Bill

If you haven't already read it, you need to grab a copy of the children's book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie to really understand the humor for this post. It's based on a style called a circular tale. One action leads to another action which leads to another and then another and then another and finally, eventually brings you back to the beginning of the story.

It's a lot of fun.

I didn't find them all that fun to read when my youngest was little, and as I have also discovered, they are not that much fun to live out in reality either. I feel for the little boy in the story that followed that mouse around.

So, if you need to pay your power bill, you will want to go on the line and pay it.

If you want to pay 'on the line' you can either 1) Use a company called SurePay (like a Western Union and requires a local bank) or 2) Use your bank (must be a local bank) or 3) power company website. 

If you are not up to this century in technology and live under a rock there are some options for you as well: 1) Mail a check (not email, mail - like as in going to a post office  and the check needs to be from a local bank) or 2) In person at the Power company.

So we opt for SurePay. If you want to pay a bill through SurePay you can go in person or go online. Husband ventures down to a local SurePay location, thinking this will be quickest, and as the teller pressures him for the bill details since he forgot to bring the bill with him, he pulls up the power company website on his mobile device. Seems the power company website, like many of the sites here was written circa 1999 or built in Lotus Notes. Needless to say the mobile rendering is less than helpful and he is barely able to make out the bill details. However, without a local bank account, she is not able to help him. He leaves, bill unpaid.

SurePay-not so Sure.

So now, it seems paying online using the bank would be better and luckily we were already in the process of setting up an account. 

If you want to set up a bank account, you will need to provide a copy of the work visa among other paperwork. 

However, because of the holidays, then a semi-lockdown,  government offices were shut down, the result is we do not have a visa and thus no bank account.

Due date for the power bill was drawing closer and now it's not the only one. Bills be comin' and we need be payin'. (Imagine that in a nice Bajan accent). I now had a water bill and a pest control bill that were also due.

As luck would have it, one of husband's colleagues who works with the banks for setting up the new entity, has a contact at our bank who can help us get our account despite the lack of a visa. We gather the additional paperwork and we are ready for account set up. 

The country then goes into a full lockdown. 8 weeks later, the bank calls to set up our appointment to sign papers. However, husband then needs to travel to the US and is away for 2.5 more weeks. Upon return we then need to wait out the 5 days of quarantine.

We finally make it to the bank and queue up to enter. A small phenomenon we have witnessed while here are the long lines at the banks. We were not sure why people lined up like this as it wasn't on specific days of the month (like in the US with 1st and 15th being pay days) but we soon found out that they are all paying bills. 

However, us having an appointment, I wasn't sure what queue we stand in. One is the teller line, one is the ATM line, another is the personal banking. Another is to meet a local celebrity. Just kidding on that last one but seriously, you have no idea what each line is for. Finally husband goes to the front which is manned by a security guard with a bottle of hand sanitizer and temperature check to ask if we are in fact in the right line. We were not. So he escorts us inside to another line. It is the "I have an appointment" line.

So after 4 months of our arrival, we finally get the bank account. 

I promptly go online, and attempt to add the Power company as a payee but I get a 'Payee Not Found' error. I presume, as an IT person, that the name has been entered in such a way that I need to be exact. I try every acronym and search term I can think of and still get 'Payee Not Found'.

We then see if we can try to pay through the power company website. We go to the site which renders much better on a laptop and finds the site is more useable with links on the left hand nav that offer Pay Online. This launches a pop up box, with links to the various banks on the island. When clicking on the link to our bank, you get a Page Not Found error.

Time is now ticking and we decide to revisit SurePay but this time online, despite our previous fail, we are optimistic now that we have a local bank account this should work.  I go online to create an account, fill in the bank info, and the final step of the process is a form that I need to sign, ...print out..... and Mail it to the SurePay office.

Mail It. With a stamp. An online form. I am going to just let that sink in.

I print the form but suggest to husband that we try again to go to the nearest SurePay to pay in person now that we have the local account. As an aside, I email customer support to ask do I really need to mail in a form for an online account.

So we are ready and go back to SurePay.  We wait in the socially distanced queue, and when our turn finally arrives, the lady runs our sparkly new card, and says it is invalid. She says it is not a local debit card. It has the local bank name on it.  It has the words Platinum Debit on it. However, she is not having any of it and asks if we have cash. The bill is rather expensive, and while I do carry more cash these days, I am not money bags- so we walk away-bill unpaid.

I have to say, leaving the SurePay I had a panic- will they shut off our power tonight or do we get a grace period? We are renting a giant place and while we don't run the power a lot, my head starts to swirl of images of me hand washing our laundry or navigating the house by candle light at night. I don't even know if we have candles.

We then decide to try and go to a bank branch. We remembered there was one nearby and as we learned many are in that line to pay their power bill. I am beginning to understand why. We go to the nearest building with the bank sign on it, but upon entering we discover it's only an ATM.

We then decide it's a sign that perhaps getting money out and going back to SurePay and paying in cash may be the best option so we attempt to take money out. The ATM is out of money.

I cannot make this stuff up.

Defeated by our multiple attempts and a meeting obligation for the husband, we arrive back home and I promptly email the bank manager for advice on the matter. And as with all emails in this country, I then sit... and wait..... for a response.

By late afternoon I can't take waiting anymore so I just call the nice girl who set up our account. Luckily she answers- and she informs me that the power company is listed in the payee list but by its initials with an '&' in the middle. 

A special character. I had been duped by a special character. I would like to point out this may be a standard for passwords but is a no-no for drop down lists. Just sayin'. 

So I pay our power bill online. Husband was on his meeting still, so I text him from the other room: "I paid the power bill". He is in shock. I am exhausted.

Shortly after this, the SurePay group responds to my email that I can just email them a signed form which they kindly attached. I did it, just in case.

So I have to say, there is absolutely zero Zen in all of this. If anything, this whole tale would drive one to question the fates of the world and if  possibly in a past life I pissed off some merchant in some market square and this is just my karma. 

All the bills are paid now. The power didn't go off. I found some torches (flashlights) in a box just in case. Much like when you give a mouse a cookie, what seemingly can be a simple task can take you full circle. What is nice is we started out wanting to pay online and that is where we wound up. So maybe in some ways it was Zen, our own little enso escapade. I am pretty sure however, this is why everyone drinks rum punch.