Somewhat fishy visit from a maintenance worker

[prog.livejournal.com]

This afternoon some guy mashed the doorbells on the house I live in until I (a home-office type) answered. He identified himself as from the City of Somerville, come to look at the house's "meters" (I didn't catch which kind), because they were emitting "bogus" readings.

He interrupted my workday, so since my mind was grinding away on other tasks, I robotically let him inside to diddle around in our basement without getting any ID or name or nuthin, or even looking outside to note the presence or absence of a Somerville-branded vehicle. Presently, the man emerged to report that all was in order, and left.

As you are aware by reading this far, I now feel like an idiot, rather aghast at how far away I let my head float. My landlord (who I emailed about this) is understandably like "wtf" at me.

Help me, I am stupid: Does it even make sense that a city worker would care about "meters"? Isn't that more the provenance of utility companies? If it does make sense, who would I call to confirm that they sent a guy out? (And would they be open on the weekend? Can you understand why the fact this all happened late Friday afternoon would make me more paranoid?)

More to the point, has this dude maybe visited anyone else with a similar goal? He was a 40/50-something heavy-set white guy in work clothes. Seemed sane and apologetically professional. So he either was who he said he was -- which is, I imagine, the more likely case -- or I totally got pwned, and have no idea what kind of horrible plots are even now hatching underneath my kitchen floor.

Comments

[jwg.livejournal.com]

In Cambridge, the water department reads each water meter electronically every day and they store the results; they supposedly will notify you if your meter readings seem odd. Several years ago I got a large water bill and when I called they were able to identify hight readings for 4 days over thanksgiving - I remembered that I'd been away and a toilet was running the whole weekend.

Does your building have a meter for each unit?

[boblothrope.livejournal.com]

Do you know how the meters communicate with the city's computer?

[jwg.livejournal.com]

I don't know the details but the meters are Neptunes and it has a pair of wires running to a Star Hexagram unit outside my house. The Star transmits using some wireless technology. They record readings 4 times a day.

[tober.livejournal.com]

For the current generation of water meters, many use a short-range radio communication system for reading. The water utility has to have a vehicle or person equipped with appropriate equipment drive or walk near the location where the meter is installed in order to read the meter. I think there also exist meters that contain wireless (telephony) modems and report their readings that way. I don't know which Cambridge uses. The latter type might actually report in daily, the former type probably get read, at most, once every couple weeks. The previous generation of meters required, for reading the meter, the utility to plug a piece of equipment into a socket located usually on the outside of the building and connected to the meter - the socket is almost always in a black rectangular housing with weatherproof cover. Before that, meters were used that required physical access to the meter in order to read.

[boblothrope.livejournal.com]

Cambridge gets meter readings four times a day, so I really hope they don't have to drive around to get within range of every meter in the city.