They say that the moment you enter university is the day you become an adult because you learn how to juggle academic priorities, social life and financial responsibilities. When in Second Year or Third Year, the day you move into a private accommodation, you become an experienced adult. I completely disagree, beg to differ, reject that statement, whatever you call it. For me, it is when you can effortlessly juggle all responsibilities effectively, you have graduated to adulthood. However as university students, how many of us can confidently tell other people that our lives are in working order, if so, how are we capable of being experienced adults who are able to pay our own bills and know exactly when we are being ripped off? Forgive me, for I’m not a local, but are electricity bills supposed to add up to 200 pounds monthly? I have absolutely no clue how this country is being run, judging from the way our house expenses start to increase after a certain month.
If not for my housemate who happened to open our electricity bill to do a random check, finding it suspicious, she decided to log into our online electricity account. To our horror, we realised that we were owed 156 pounds to the electricity company. How did that even happen? So it goes that even though we paid the minimal sum to the electricity company, if we used more than we paid, the amount will accumulate which we will have to pay before we shift out. Our question was, why couldn’t it be more straightforward? Simply by checking our meter then charging us according to how much we use monthly, this is a much simpler method in my opinion rather than getting a rude shock of realising that we were actually in debt. Fortunately, we realised it the beginning of this year and we have been consciously trying to use less energy in our house since then. However, 7 months into this advanced ‘adulting’ course has been proven to be a dismal failure. The fact that we struggled for many days to understand the working of how to pay our electricity bills already says how we have not yet graduated from this basic ‘adulting’ course but were thrust into this scary world of paying bills, constantly worrying if we were just getting ripped off our money by blood-sucking government-run corporations.
To conclude, the simple solution to this is just to move back to student accommodation, just pay a lump sum and let the professionals worry about the rest. You can turn the heating on full blast and enjoy individual toilet privileges, after all, the shocking amount that you pay for electricity together with the rent is probably equivalent what you will pay in total for student accommodation anyway.
