Taxi Conversation

03-15-06
My Telasi Story

I guess it was time I learned to pay my own bills. Last year my landlords took care of it, and I just paid them whatever they told me. This year my housemate Celeste and I pay it ourselves.

I came home from Sighnaghi, and was sitting down to wade through a mass of emails when the power went out. I called Celeste and she confirmed that it seemed like a long time since we had paid an electricity bill. I called our landlady Lela. She said I needed to go downstairs and look for a bill near the bank of meters, so I did that and found three bills, each with a last name not corresponding to our landlord. Another phonecall cleared up this point though, so bill in hand, I trooped out to the bank to pay.

At the bank, I was informed that if my electricity had been cut as a result of non-payment, it would take four days to reconnect me. Unless… I were to go directly to Telasi, the parent electricity-distribution company.

Has anyone seen the documentary ‘Power Trip?’ It is a ghost documentary that is floating around out there. Everyone who has seen it brags about how good it is, but it never seems to be available. For the last two years, I’ve been one of the victims of never seeing this movie until finally, I saw a bootleg copy last week. The film is about an American energy company, AES, that buys Telasi and takes over the Tbilisi electric grid. They were here five years, and lost something like $100,000 a day, because no clients could pay their bills. There are classic scenes of arriving at neighborhood electricity transformer sheds, only to find hundreds of wires coming out and stretching directly up to each apartment in a huge tangled mass of illegal wires. Another humorous scene shows one of the American managers shaking his head in astonishment as he holds a cheap electronic device that is capable of reversing meter readings. It was impossible for them to make any money here. Great movie, the story edited together through the interviews of all sorts of people involved. If you get a chance, see it.

Anyway, the bank couldn’t explain to me where Telasi headquarters were, but one elderly gentleman in the bank offered to take me there! So we walked and talked all the way through Old Town, jumped on a marshutka heading out of town, and when we got off, he paid the twenty five cent fee for me. What a great guy!

He pointed me up a street to a little yellow building. When I arrived there, a guard pointed down a long gravel driveway past another building. At the end of the driveway, still no signs in sight, a fire-escape stairwell ascended to an open, second-story door. With no hesitation (I’m used to this), I climbed up and entered a long empty hallway. I want electricity!

I knocked on a random door, a manager came out, and explaining my situation to him, he sat me down and disappeared. When he came back, he told me I was in the Telasi Gas Headquarters, and I needed to walk ten minutes and find the Telasi Electricity Headquarters.

So I did that. I found this place, and just as I was about to walk in, two guards stopped me and pointed out a sign on the door: ‘lunch break.’

I waited around for an hour, finally went in, paid my bill, and was promised electricity within four hours. End of story. When I came home in the evening, there was electricity! I felt relieved, because the story could have been a lot worse. I guess I’ve been over here for some time now.