Accidentally Switching Electrical Companies

I was at home cooking not too long ago, when some guy in a uniform rang my doorbell. He was in an electrical company jumpsuit, so I felt comfortable opening the door for him; I was confident he wasn’t an NHK collector and a home invasion and/or kidnapping would have made a pretty good story.

But this is nothing that extravagant. It’s more mundane, really. Comical, almost, in its tedium.

The man in uniform wanted to tell me about how my electrical bill was going to go down. He said this in Japanese, but when I asked him to slow down because I’m not all that great at the language, he started sweating a bit. To his credit, he tried to use English to explain things.

I was happy about the lower price and I said I’d go along with it. He said that he would need my phone number, which I gave. He called it in front of me and once he saw my phone ring, he was satisfied. As he left, he said that a coworker of his would call me to explain more details of the situation. But first, I needed to write down my date of birth, name in Romaji, and phone number.

And apparently, that’s where they got my application -- this is where I done goofed.

The guy who called me fifteen minutes after the first guy spoke in lightning-fast Japanese, even after I asked him to slow down. There was a lot of vocabulary that I couldn’t understand, but I could get the gist that he was saying something about a plan and that the prices would be set low. At this point, I didn’t think I signed up for anything, so I just kept replying with “Okei-desu” every time the man stopped talking. When he hung up, I got a text message.

Now, this message was a notification that I had completed my application with the new electrical company. What happened to my old power company? I didn’t realize until now how easy it was to switch companies!

At least, from my research online, the new company is a bit cheaper than TEPCO. I still worry about what kind of hooks they’ll get me with though. Even my English isn’t good enough to catch all of the hidden terms, imagine how it is for me in Japanese! I hope it ends up alright and with a cheaper bill, as I was told.