For most of us, dealing with utilities or large corporations is straightforward, if a bit impersonal: pay your bills down to the last cent. If you don’t, the service gets cut, and the company will cheerfully chase you down for the balance – sometimes spending more than the bill itself to recover it.
This process makes sense. It simply isn’t feasible to manually handle every transaction or customer inquiry when a company serves thousands, or even millions. That’s where computers come in. Before automation, this was handled by rooms full of employees – highly trained, efficiently robotic humans who functioned as an analog computer. Either way, there’s no time for deliberation – only execution of policy.
The downside is obvious: when a human touch is needed, it can be frustratingly absent. We’ve all endured the endless menu loops, disinterested call center scripts, and bureaucratic black holes. Yet, we deal with it. Why? Because we expect to take responsibility for our own accounts, and we understand that if we don’t advocate for ourselves, no one else will.
Pompeii Estates of Bayside, New York, evidently sees things differently. In Pompeii Estates, Inc. v. Consolidated Edison Co. of N.Y., Inc., Pompeii sued the utility for “wrongful termination” of electrical service, claiming roughly $1,000 in property damage.
(Grimmelmann, J. (n.d.). Internet Law: Cases and Problems.)
Pompeii’s core argument was that notices of nonpayment were sent to the property itself, not to their business office – and as such, they were unaware of the issue. The court ruled in Pompeii’s favor, finding Consolidated Edison negligent for terminating service without proper notice.
I would argue the opposite – not only should Consolidated Edison have prevailed, but it may have had cause to counter-sue to recover costs and court fees.
Let’s consider a few facts:
Negligence is defined as a failure to exercise reasonable care – what a prudent person would do under similar circumstances.
The court ruled that by relying on computer-automated processes, Consolidated Edison failed to meet this standard.
“While the computer is a useful instrument, it cannot serve as a shield to relieve Consolidated Edison of its obligation to exercise reasonable care when terminating service.”
That raises a question: Is it not also negligent to ignore your own bills? Is it not the very definition of carelessness to assume that, because a bill wasn’t received at your preferred location, no action is required? A prudent property owner should be aware of their own expenses. There’s no evidence that Pompeii made any effort to ensure those expenses were tracked or that notices – misdirected or not – were followed up on.
The court appeared to place all responsibility on the utility, stating that a human element was required to catch the failure. Yet in practical terms, any human – given the same information – would likely have made the same decision. If a bill goes unpaid for two months, and no response follows a termination notice, the only reasonable course of action is termination.
The court even stated:
“Certainly, any reasonably prudent person, if in doubt, would contact Mr. Vebeliunas to ascertain the facts.”
“This is especially so when the termination of service is in the middle of winter and the foreseeable consequences to the heating system and the water pipes are apparent. Where there is a foreseeability of damage to another that may occur from one’s acts, there arises a duty to use care.”
Let’s break that down. The ruling suggests that anyone – even someone without ownership interest – should have foreseen the risk and acted. Yet somehow, the owner of the property is exempt from this expectation? If that’s the standard, we’re no longer dealing with a duty of care – we’re assigning blame based on who has the deeper pockets.
To be fair, perhaps we don’t have the whole picture. Maybe there were additional facts not captured in the case summary. Maybe the ruling was overturned on appeal. But based on the available documentation, this decision seems to reward the kind of passive negligence that, for the rest of us, would be laughed out of court.