Dear Former Tenant,

I’m going to do you the favor of explaining the City of Austin’s standard operating proceedure for the transfer/cancellation of services, seeing as you are obviously disinclined towards calling the customer service number provided on your bill. Provided you have paid your bills on time, which I believe you have, since, according to our (my current and your former) landlord, you are a responsible person (ask me why I know this), your final billing statement shall include the return of your deposit, appropriately labeled with a sum of money followed by a ‘CR’, which stands for credit. This means you are being creditted this amount, not charged it, ok? You are getting a refund of your deposit, not being billed an excess charge because I have not switched the utilities to my name. I understand how this may be confusing, honestly, I do. However, the appropriate course of action, to clear up confusion regarding sums on your utilities bill, is to call the City of Austin using the customer service number which, again, is provided on your bill, and ask them about your account, not my landlord to complain that you’ve had to pay for my electricity because I’ve neglected to set up my utilities account, subsequently causing my landlord to call me at work to tell me that you‘re very upset and that my electricity will be shut off, consequentally prompting me to take off from work in the middle of the day to gather my bills, retrieve my account number, and call City of Austin to make sure my account was in order – which it was.

By the way, you should also change your address with the USPS. If you do not attempt to contact me in order to retrieve your mail, I will drop it off at the post office and instruct them to return-to-sender.

-SB