WHEN I OPENED the envelope and found I was holding a utility bill for $602, I was filled with a sense of righteous indignation, which did not sit well at all atop a largish slice of apple pie. The thing is, I hate paying for stuff I can't see, like electricity and gas.

The bill was from PowerGen, a sort of corporate Bonnie and Clyde whose possession of a handful of dynamos and cables and a piece of official paper from the government apparently gives it license to commit unbridled banditry upon the population at large.

For what amounts to the price of a down payment on a luxury cruise around the world, I get enough electrons to run a few lightbulbs, radios conveying streams of Celine Dion screeches and a TV full of hot-air electioneering, the Jerry Springer show and cows that have gone to join Jesus.

Even the toilet in our cottage runs on electricity (don't ask), so it's not as if we have any option to PowerGen and its general utilities ilk in gas and water - unless we choose to dig a one-holer in the back garden, fetch water from the millrace down the lane and burn junk mail for heating.

But $602 for three months' worth of juice? I've tried to work out how they came to that figure, and it seems to involve calculations, the likes of which by comparison make Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity a routine classroom exercise for second-graders at Chilhowee Elementary in Knoxville.

As best I can gather, PowerGen's formula multiplies the number of light years in a parsec by the coefficient of turnip prices in China divided by the diameter of Bill Clinton's naughty bits to the square of the Solar System's methane content plus the cube root of Fidel Castro's home phone number less 2.7 on a windy Thursday afternoon.

In my case, that came to $602 plus change, which seems rather a lot for two people, three cats, a kitten and an assortment of spiders in one smallish cottage in England's Midlands.

I have my suspicions, and if I'm right, there's a lesson here for any of us who, lured by the siren call of home improvements, might be tempted to call in the builders and to compound that felony by lending them untrammeled access to the electric supply.

We hired on our builders to construct a two-floor extension to the cottage, a project they undertook while we remained entrenched at our home in London. (No one even marginally brighter than an amoeba, not a masochist and not on the run from serial murder charges chooses to live on a building site.)

In the final days of the work, I happened to drop in to check on the rate of progress, or lack thereof. What I found were no workmen but three 1,500-watt electric heaters going full blast at various locations abut the premises.

I checked the electric meter and instinctively flinched when I spotted the little disk inside making like a roulette wheel on speed. I began having a sneaking regret also that I did not hold shares in PowerGen.

That regret turned to abject horror when, after I finally tracked him down, Reg the site foreman allowed as how those heaters had been running 24/7 for three weeks.

"It's the walls, mate," Reg whined. "Them walls are so damp the wallpaper won't stick on, and it needs them 'eaters to dry 'em out. Otherwise, the paper's all gonna come down, you mark my word."

I was more of a mind to mark his skull with a hammer conveniently lying nearby. Instead, I gritted my teeth and tried to extract from him the cause of all this dampness that necessitated putting three industrial-sized heaters on round-the-clock overtime.

Reg pointed to the cottage next door, where a faulty gutter was busily bucketing water onto the walls of my abode. This cottage is owned by a do-it-yourself nerd named Stephen, who with two less IQ points would be a toadstool with feet.

Stephen has been "self-improving" his cottage. He started this project eight years ago. Today, tar paper still flaps from the unfinished roof, a cinderblock wall he built in 1993 remains unpainted and his back garden is in bad need of a dependable junkyard dog.

Had Stephen been in charge, the Egyptian pyramids today would be stacks of granite blocks covered by flapping tarpaper and pouring rainwater onto the Sphinx next door. Instead, he was in charge of a wretched gutter that was helping turn my cottage into a hothouse with toilet and mod cons.

I suggested to Stephen that he redirect the water from his gutter and pointedly advised him that he could expect to seek hospital assistance to remove the gutter from a sensitive part of his anatomy if he did not do so pronto. He did.

But I, of course, forgot about that spinning wheel in the electric meter that was toting up the kilowatt hours at a rate of knots - until the February bill from PowerGen arrived, demanding I cough up $558. I can't imagine what they thought all those electrons were doing at 17 Mill Lane.

Whatever, once I recovered from the shock I paid up, assuming that was the end of the rather expensive matter. I assumed wrong. I had failed to realize that that February bill was an estimated one. (Utilities in Britain tend to send you estimated bills every three months, until a meter man shows up, generally about once a year.)

So rather in the manner of supplying Bonnie and Clyde with the bullets, I supplied PowerGen in May with correct, up-to-date and - as it turned out - oh, so sizable numbers. They put these through their formulaic wringer, and out churned $602. Plus, as I say, change.

The lesson here is, pocket all your fuses before the builders arrive. Then, if your new walls are still damp, set your neighbor's cottage ablaze. The fire will make sure your walls are dried out by the time you get out of the slammer.

Alternatively, buy shares in the electric company.

Thought for the Week: What would a chair look like if your knees bent the other way?

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