okay so i live in massachusetts, which in a bunch of ways is one of the less shitty states in the US, but a bunch of our utilities are privatized and recently in this state, rather than the companies having to provide power in a certain range of prices restricted by legislation in order to have the right to deliver power, they changed it so that you still only have one choice for power "delivery" (owning all the wires and infrastructure that bring you the power) but "freedom of choice" for power "supply." (i assume this involves generating the power and moving it around on some balance sheet? i'm not 100% sure. someone does in fact have to, you know, make the power.)
when they first did this, basically everyone offering me "freedom of choice" was offering me an obviously shitty deal, and the correct answer was "no i want to get power from the power company, please get off my porch." however in the last two months my power company has decided they want out of the business of generating power, and more than doubled their supply rate per kilowatt hour, such that by saving power over the last two months, i nonetheless had double the expenditure for energy. cool! love that for me! "luckily" i can go express my "freedom of choice" and get a cheaper provider, right?
well i did this, but the web form didn't actually work, it caused someone to send me an email saying i needed to make a phone call. when i did that, i spent ten minutes telling someone the information i had already put into the webform, and then he said "oh well i am not authorized to give you the rate you signed up at, but i can give you rate X instead, and for your trouble i can give you a $75 gift card!" rate X, at my current electric usage, would lose me around $400 over the course of the contract. so i said no! and he said "okay i'll pass you to the department that can give you that rate, then" and then left me on hold for thirty minutes and i hung up.
i then decided to try another company because fuck them, and i spent a couple of minutes stuck here:
(this is a picture of a dropdown menu for state, with the state filled in, and a little popup message saying "This field is required." even though the field is... filled in. i eventually got it working in a different web browser. i even turned off all of my extensions and whatnot in firefox, but it simply required that i use safari.)
this plan won't kick in until March 1st, which is why i didn't pick it first even though it is cheaper, and also will turn into a variable rate plan in six months, so in six months i will have to run this riddle trail again to make sure i'm not getting screwed over. why do i need to play this minigame in order to have electricity??? this should absolutely be nationalized. but i feel soooooooo free, y'all. so fucking free. love this "innovation" in "getting to have a basic utility"