Watt? Woman receives $284B electric bill

She rules out Christmas lights as the cause

A Pennsylvania woman was shocked when she received an erroneous electric bill displaying an account balance of $284 billion. Was it the Christmas lights?

What can you buy with $284 billion?

You could own all of Netflix. Or purchase 747 Boeing 747s, with change to spare. Or erase the national debts of Venezuela, Nigeria, Peru and Iceland, combined.

Or, if you’re Mary Horomanski, you could pay for one month’s worth of electricity.

Horomanski, from Erie, Pa., was shocked recently when she received an erroneous electric bill displaying an account balance of “284,460,000,000,” with a first payment due of $28,176.

“I opened it up and there it was,” she told The Washington Post.

Horomanski, 58, began counting the commas (“Hundreds. Thousands. Millions. Billions. … Can most people even count that high?”), then taking her glasses off and putting them on again.

“It wasn’t due until November of 2018,” she said. “It was like, well, I guess we have a year to come up with this billion-dollar bill.”

In a brief moment of self-doubt, the stay-athome mother of five boys also took stock of the electricity her household was using.

“We had Christmas lights outside, but we don’t have the ‘(National Lampoon’s) Christmas Vacation’ lights,” Horomanski said. “And I’m looking at my Christmas tree, and I’m like, no, that wouldn’t have caused it.”

Horomanski texted an image of the bill to her oldest son, who immediately contacted Penelec, their electric company.

The company quickly reassured him it was an error, Horomanski said.

The correct amount was $284.46 — still a little high, to be honest, compared to the previous month’s bill of $161, Horomanski thought. But at least not a figure that threatened to send her into cardiac arrest.

She also sent a picture of the bill to her local newspaper, the Erie TimesNews, which wrote about the mistake in a story that went viral.

Mark Durbin, a spokesman for First Energy, Penelec’s parent company, told the Erie Times-News he didn’t know what caused the error.