In article , Home Guy wrote:

dpb wrote:

Very similar problem to what I and several others propositioned--
that it wasn't a "real" usage problem but either a human or computer-
generated problem...

The meter was read correctly - to the extent that the reader entered the
correct numbers into a large handheld device of some sort.

You wouldn't think that there would be any other human hands touching
the data after that point, at any other point in the chain that leads to
the preparation of my monthly bill. Because I can't imagine the upwards
of 50 to 100 thousand customers having their bills similarly "touched"
by human hands, on a monthly basis.

As for this being a computer-generated problem, you would think that any
code that transforms "47" into "87" would have been caught long ago.

Be that as it may, how do you account for the first unusually high
reading, a bit more than a year ago IIRC? Seems like any erroneous
reading or transcription thereof would get spotted / corrected /
credited the next month.