Questions that you don't want answered

I use to think that there was no such thing as a bad question. Spain has taught me that I was wrong. Take, for example, the question, “How long can you go without paying any of your utility bills before your utilities stop functioning?” The answer is 4 months and 4 days. To be completely accurate, after 4 months and 4 days an order is sent to a subcontractor to turn off your utilities. The water subcontractor is the most efficient, taking only 2 days to shut off the water. Both the gas subcontractor and the electric subcontractor take longer (thankfully I don't know exactly how long).

I'm sure this leads to another question. Why in the world would anyone who can pay their utility bills, go so long without paying them. As you might have guessed, the answer is that I had no idea that I wasn't paying any of my utilities. When we moved out to Sant Cugat, all the utilities were set up by a relocation firm who tied them to our bank account (also set up by the relocation firm). During my second week in Sant Cugat, I went in to the bank to set up a wire transfer into my account. I asked them why they charged so much to accept money (2%). They told me that this was their standard rate and showed me where it was listed in a brochure. I told them that I still thought this was too much. They then asked me if 1% would be OK. I told them that I still thought that this was too much. They said to do any better would require talking with the branch manager. I asked them to talk to the branch manager. The bank official came back and asked if a flat fee of 15 Euros would be acceptable. I said, that is OK with me. Early in this conversation I realized that my Spanish was not up to the task at hand, so I had called the relocation service and had someone on the phone who could act as a translator, allowing most of this conversation to be accomplished by passing a cell phone back and forth. Now apart from getting a better rate for receiving wire transfers, at some point during this visit (probably during the first 2 seconds), the bank realized that I was not a Spanish citizen. They also realized that my account number was one reserved for Spanish citizens so they made a tinny, little change to the number allowing everyone looking at the account would know that I'm an extranjero (foreigner). Now, believe it or not, I remembered that my utilities were tied to the original bank number, so I asked the relocation agent to make sure that things would still be linked up. He told me, “No pase nada”. (Don't worry about a thing.) And that was the last I worried about it for 4 months and 6 days.

Another oddity about utilities is that the names listed on the contracts are for various previous tenants. For example, the gas is listed for Fernandez, the electric is for Jose, and the water is for Felip, with these three making up only a small fraction of the names of people who receive mail at our address. Not wanting to open other peoples mail, I've been collecting up their letters and giving them to the local post office, happily passing on all the disconnection notices without even realizing what they were. My recent experience has caused me to reevaluate this procedure.

As a final note, the water company finally had office hours this morning. I was able to go in, explain the situation (all in Spanish without my cell phone translator), and pay my back bills. This has lead, in under 2 hours, to my water being turned back on. If anyone was wondering, having water is much better than hopping over the neighbors fence to load up buckets of water to fill up the toilets.