A Saudi grandmother here got the shock of her life recently when the Saudi Electricity Company (SEC) informed her via SMS that she owed them almost SR52 million for power consumption, reported Al-Watan Arabic daily. Umm Khalid was having her morning coffee and a chat with her family when one of her grandsons informed her that she had received an SMS message. When she picked up her phone, she was stunned by the astronomical figure in the message. The message said: “Dear Subscriber, your bill has been issued and you have to pay an amount of SR51,998,046 for this month's consumption.” At first she thought that the amount was SR51 but when she looked again her heart fell. She saw that the bill was authentic and had come from the SEC. She quickly logged into her SEC account online, to find an identical message. However, shortly afterwards the SEC realized its mistake and sent her a new message with her monthly bill of only SR387.70. Commenting on the strange incident, Abdul Salam Al-Yamani, SEC Deputy Executive President for Public Affairs, said it was a computer mistake and not an error in the meter reading. He said the SEC has two million subscribers who are sent their bills via SMS. He said human error was to blame and apologized to Umm Khalid for any inconvenience caused.
