Bangkok Post, Thailand, Insider Column.

Jul. 27--POWER TO THE PEOPLE: If you live in Bangkok, you're about to be offered some powerful incentives to pay your electricity bills by having them debited against your bank account. Like the banks themselves, the Metropolitan Electricity Authority is looking to discourage human interaction, which is expensive.

The MEA employs more than 1,000 collection staff, which is probably about three times as many as it would need if it were run like a real business, but par for the course for a government agency. Now it wants to slim down, with an early-retirement plan imminent, according to an MEA executive.

If you do like the personal touch and insist on paying your bill at an MEA office, you'll be charged 10 baht for the privilege. That's one incentive to switch to having the costs deducted from your bank account.

Another incentive is the MEA's capricious billing procedure, under which bills frequently arrive in your mailbox just two or three days before the due date. At least they do in our case.

So the direct-debit option is worth exploring. In our own experience, this is a relatively painless process. You simply go to the bank branch where your account resides, even if it is a million miles from where you live or work. You can't go to any other branch of the same bank because that would be too easy. You fill out a lot of forms, some of which will be forwarded to the MEA for processing, which takes only two months.

Until Aug 31, your reward for switching to the bank and helping the MEA with its overstaffing problem will be entry into a prize draw.

And the prizes? Why, they include home theatre systems, video and DVD players and the like.