Meter Mayhum

In the house that we previously owned ants built a nest in our gas meter. They broke the dial. The gas company showed that we were using very little gas. They came out, discovered the nest, and back charged us for the gas that we used that did not register on our broken meter.

Needless to say, when we saw a bird visiting our electric meter last week we were concerned. It appeared that she was just in the box that held our meter, not in the actual meter. We were a lot more anxious this time around about wet nest materials shorting out our meter and thus setting our house on fire than we were about back charges.

After a call to the electric company I was sad to find out that I was going to be the one to have to clean out the nest. They would come and open the box and shut off the meter and then return after I had cleaned it out (during business hours, of course, while Big J was at work). I was in tears the night before because I invisoned tiny little baby birds whose home I was going to have to disrupt. I made a plan involving work gloves, a shovel and the park across the street (where I was going to move the nest to). I had the number handy of the college kid from my church who lives nearby just in case it was too much for me to handle(emotionally).

Mr. Electric company never did shut off my power nor did he leave. He simply opened the box and scraped the nest to the ground. Unfortunalty there were two little eggs inside (and I'm not sure what happened to them). But, just for future reference, if there were baby birds inside the box could be left open to see if the mommy bird would come and rescue them. I will keep that in mind since creatures seem to have a thing for our meters!