$284B Electric Bill Shocks Woman, Who Blames Christmas Lights

ERIE, PA — Mary Horomanski got a mega-voltage sized jolt earlier this month when she popped online to check her electric bill. The amount due — are you ready for this, $284 billion — was mind-boggling. Can people even count this high, she asked herself as she ticked off the zeros and took her glasses off, then put them on again to inspect the bill once more. Had the family fouled something up when they put up their Christmas lighting, a modest display Horomanski said didn’t come close to matching fictional character Clark Griswold’s garish standard bearer in “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation”?

No, the foul-up was electricity provider Penelec’s. A decimal point was misplaced, bloating Horomanski’s actual bill of $284.46 to more than three times the net worth of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, the richest man in the world.

That’s some error, and Horomanski now jokes that she asked her son to switch up his Christmas gift and give her a heart monitor.

“My eyes just about popped out of my head,” Horomanski, 58, told The Erie Times-News of seeing the $284 billion-plus electric bill.

She doesn't appear to be embellishing too much for the sake of a story. Her husband and a couple of their sons saw the whole thing go down.

“I’m looking around the room and they’re looking at me now, ’cause I’ve got this funny look on my face,” Horomanski told The Washington Post. “When you see something like that, your heart starts beating, you break out into a little sweat, like, ‘What on Earth just happened?’ ”

Officials at First Energy, Penelec’s parent company, said they aren’t sure how the error occurred, but they corrected it immediately.

“I can’t recall ever seeing a bill for billions of dollars,” Mark Durbin, a spokesman for First Energy, Penelec’s parent company, told the Erie newspaper. “We appreciate the customer’s willingness to reach out to us about the mistake.”

Horomanski told The Post that she and her son simultaneously thought about what might have been a greater shock with long-lasting consequences.

“My son Mike and I were both saying, almost simultaneously, ‘Holy bologna, could you imagine if I had that automatic payment and it just came out of the account?’ ” she said. “I could not stop thinking about this.”

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