I have a really strange update from London.

My apartment has an electrical setup that requires me to go to the post office, load a “key” (essentially a thumb drive) with up to £50 at a time and then put it in the meter at my apartment.

The meter tracks my electricity usage.

If I forget to load the key, the power goes out.

As someone who has never had an understanding of how much electricity I’m using, I find this wildly stressful.

Also… is it 1942 in England? Like, what even is this? I am London! This was not a thing in Sheffield, which is the middle of a ton of fields and sheep, ten years ago.

My landlord plans to have the electric company convert it to a regular box where I get a monthly bill, but it hasn’t happened yet.

And so I live an exceptionally weird life of wondering if I’ve forgotten to load my meter for too long (it is conveniently not in my flat, but on the ground floor in a dank and creepy murder room behind the stairs).

I’m also incredibly fortunate because I know I moved into a budget area, and I constantly see people at the post office putting £5 to £10 on their key – like… that’s 2 to 3 days. You live a life with only enough to pay for 2 to 3 days of electricity?!?!

How do poor people live with this stress? And these constant stupid interruptions to their lives.

For me, there is just this super weird, constant stress that I’ve messed it up and my electric is going to go out while I’m mid-working online. Over time, I’ve got a general idea of how much electricity I use daily but at first, it was constant near panic for me.

Like… is it even possible to blow through £50 of electricity in a few days? I don’t know. But I was constantly convinced I was going to.

Also, this is an inconvenient PITA for sure. Sometimes I can just pop right in and out of the post office and other times the line is a mile long and it takes me an hour to recharge me electric key but it’s the flipping electricity! I just have to wait. It has to be done.

And again, with the whole being fairly financially stable, I have a system where I can afford to keep my key charged at all times, so if I ever did mess up (hasn’t happened yet), I’d just pop downstairs and reload the meter since my key is sitting there with £30-50 at all times. Then I go reload it the next day.

And even that was a choice because I don’t know when this conversion to the normal electric box is going to happen. At first I was reluctant to load too much on the key. But it was making me so anxious, I decided I’d rather lose some money and know I’m set than keep stressing about my electricity going out.

I realize this may all read as wildly naïve but we all have different life experiences. I’ve never had to worry that the electricity might just go out.

It was legit all I could think about the first few days until I started to feel the tiniest bit confident that I could navigate this garbage situation. And, totally unsurprisingly, having extra money to throw at the problem has dramatically improved my stress level about this situation.

Did you even know you could have to pre-load an electric meter? That there are electricity keys? Have you ever done this?