These days, my bills get deposited in my email inbox, and generally speaking their monthly arrival isn't much of an event. This past week, however, I got a real shock when I clicked on and opened the email tagged "Your Duke Power Statement is Available for Viewing."

Unless you're living much farther south than me (Miami's nice), then you'll have already come to terms with the fact that it's cold AND that your consumption of electricity is conversely proportional to the outside air temperature. Low temperatures, high electric bill. It goes without saying.

I know, I know. I'm pitifully attempting to heighten the drama of a banality. All right, well here goes. The Fidelity Court #62's power bill for the last 28-day billing cycle:

$15.76

And, yes, the decimal point is in the right place, and after five days since viewing (and paying) that ludicrously paltry sum, I'm still agape. I took a quick look back through last year's billing history and found that, for the same month and number of days in 2004, Steffi and I paid Duke Power $75. How the hell did we save $60 this year?

For that matter, this marks the cheapest month we've EVER HAD as tenants in our Carrboro townhouse. Even during the summer, when we refuse to run the air and have what's termed a "Load-Control Credit" of about $8-$10 a month, we never skipped away with a statement less than $19. There must be a (good?) ghost in the machine, because there's simply no way that we consumed only about 405KwH for January.

Problem is, now I've got some mad "psychomachea" going on: Should I contact the power company and ask them to check the meter, acting as the good and honest citizen? Or do I listen to the wallet and let it go? Honestly, I'm tempted to wait for the next bill and then see whether it, too, is equally anomalous. If so, then (or so I tell myself) I'll ask the good people at Duke if I can donate to their coffers.

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Final thought:

I should definitely go back to school if a Duke Power statement is a "good story."