Darwin: The land where everything costs ALOT more. It's been well over a year now and I am confident I will never get over how much everything costs here. Food is obvs ridiculous, I paid almost $4 for a small bunch of radishes the other day. Fucking radishes! $5 for a loaf of bread. BREAD! Then there are the taxes. Alcohol is taxed to the ridiculous extreme that Australian wines are generally a lot cheaper in the US than here. Wine is not as bad as beer and liquor though. Expect to pay $50 for a bottle of Absolut or Jack Daniels (uhh regular size bottle). Forget something like Grey Goose, totally out of budget. Beer is INSANE though. The other day I saw a case of pale ale at the store up the street for $110!!! Others were hovering around $90. And lucky I dont smoke because cigarettes are around $22 a pack.
Living in Darwin, you get especially screwed over because they up the price of everything because "it's a remote area and they have to truck everything in from down south" yadda yadda. Basically, I think it's store owers saying, "You dont want to pay this price? Try and find it somewhere else, bitches! Suck it!" Another perk of living in Darwin is you get to pay a whole shit load more for electricity too! This is really fucked. It's hot here, really hot. So hot the heat makes you sick. You have to use an air conditioner or it's just too hot to sleep. Our electricity comes from the Power Water Corporation. It took me about 6 months of living here to understand that Power Water is a government institution. I was thinking it was like National Grid, but it's not, it's a department of the Northern Territory government. Anyway, you've heard me bitch that there was an election here last year and a new party took office. They allegedly uncovered all this eradict spending the previous govt had been covering up and made all kinds of cuts (like my job!). Additionally, they decided it was absolutely crucial to raise power bills to help balance the budget. Now, I couldn't imagine power bills being any higher than they already were. We are billed quarterly and the bills are normally around $600-900! Yes, $900 for 3 months of electricity when no one is home all day. I obvs have been bitching to them for a year now but their only response is to accuse me of "overusing" my air conditioning.
The price increase is really out of hand. We just paid our last bill which covered over the Christmas holiday season. $650 for a 3 month bill of which no one was home for 7 weeks! The only thing that was running was the fridge! Obvs we bitch again. This time we tell them we suspect there is something faulty with our meter causing power to be running even when everything has been turned off. The customer service agent says, "That may be the case. If you'd like us to look into it, it will be $120 to send a technician." !!!!!!!!!!!! $^$%#$&!!! You have to be kidding. Then what? The technician says it's fine and we just keep paying?! So today is the day. We fight the man. Not taking no for an answer. Calling Power Water today and getting to the bottom of this, without paying $120! All fired up!
Living in Darwin, you get especially screwed over because they up the price of everything because "it's a remote area and they have to truck everything in from down south" yadda yadda. Basically, I think it's store owers saying, "You dont want to pay this price? Try and find it somewhere else, bitches! Suck it!" Another perk of living in Darwin is you get to pay a whole shit load more for electricity too! This is really fucked. It's hot here, really hot. So hot the heat makes you sick. You have to use an air conditioner or it's just too hot to sleep. Our electricity comes from the Power Water Corporation. It took me about 6 months of living here to understand that Power Water is a government institution. I was thinking it was like National Grid, but it's not, it's a department of the Northern Territory government. Anyway, you've heard me bitch that there was an election here last year and a new party took office. They allegedly uncovered all this eradict spending the previous govt had been covering up and made all kinds of cuts (like my job!). Additionally, they decided it was absolutely crucial to raise power bills to help balance the budget. Now, I couldn't imagine power bills being any higher than they already were. We are billed quarterly and the bills are normally around $600-900! Yes, $900 for 3 months of electricity when no one is home all day. I obvs have been bitching to them for a year now but their only response is to accuse me of "overusing" my air conditioning.
The price increase is really out of hand. We just paid our last bill which covered over the Christmas holiday season. $650 for a 3 month bill of which no one was home for 7 weeks! The only thing that was running was the fridge! Obvs we bitch again. This time we tell them we suspect there is something faulty with our meter causing power to be running even when everything has been turned off. The customer service agent says, "That may be the case. If you'd like us to look into it, it will be $120 to send a technician." !!!!!!!!!!!! $^$%#$&!!! You have to be kidding. Then what? The technician says it's fine and we just keep paying?! So today is the day. We fight the man. Not taking no for an answer. Calling Power Water today and getting to the bottom of this, without paying $120! All fired up!
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