Yes, THE power company. There is no other, ever, anywhere. It used to be government owned and operated during the Marcos years but then the following president spun it off to a corporation that can charge whatever the hell it wants for power.
After living here for several years I can deal with a lot...
I can deal with the constant power outages with no known reason for anywhere from 15 minutes to 45 minutes at a time.
I can deal with the increases in charges per KWH every 6 months or so.
I can even deal with a bill being due 5 days after it is printed.
However, I cannot deal with the absolute hell that we've been dealing with for the last 3 months.
Let me summarize:
We have very little in the form of electrical stuffs.
1 medium size refrigerator
1 PC with flat panel monitor (no printer or scanner)
3 fans
1 evaporative cooler (either this OR the fans are on, not both at the same time)
various cell phones and gadgets that are only plugged up to charge, then chargers unplugged and put away quickly.
We have had these same items for years and when we lived in another part of the city we only paid between P800 and P1100 for power.
When we moved to this new apartment two years ago we continued this trend, then oddly a year ago it spiked to around P1700. We had the meter calibrated and then assumed that the change was something to do with new rates.
In February the power bill went down a bit, then a bit more in March and in April it was all the way down to P400 and then in May it was P6.
Yes, you read that right.. P6 which is about 12 cents US. Something was definitely not right. I had already communicated in April to the maintenance that there may be a problem since the power dropped so much and then in May I informed Meralco who just said "i dunno" and refused to check on it.
Well, then in June I got a bill for P2,500 and I jumped out of my skin.
I checked the KWH consumption and did some power consuming math. All of our electrical stuff combined running 24 hours a day all month long could not have used up all the power we were getting billed for. So I called Meralco, the customer service people looked up my info, we did a collective "holy crap!" and they dispatched tech teams.
EDIT: UPDATE: Just for kicks we shut off the power for an hour and a half last night. Guess what? Meter showed power consumption! I guess whoever is connected to our meter isn't there in the middle of the day (gee whodathunkit?).