"You pay the bill too fast, you should always wait 24 to 48 hours before paying a bill in Portugal"

So we requested to E-Redes, Portugal’s electricity network operator, for our house to be upgraded from 10 kVa “potencia” to 41 kVa because Portuguese houses are chronically underpowered.

Process took months but it worked. Nice!

You have to pay ~400 EUR for this, and like many services in Portugal, you cannot pay with a foreign bank account, you HAVE to pay it with a Portuguese bank account with a system they call Multibanco, which is actually just IBAN in the background but made to force Portuguese to use Portuguese bank accounts (very illegal and monopolistic behavior but that’s for a different post!)

Anyway, we try pay and the “Reference number is invalid”.

So we call the network operator, and after being on hold for 15 minutes a woman picks up.

She says, I kid you not:

"You pay the bill too fast, you should always wait 24 to 48 hours before paying a bill in Portugal"

And we should not pay Multibanco bills immediately because it can take 2-3 days for the reference number to processed by the banks.

Which is hilarious because Portuguese are insistent on you paying bills fast or they start sending you notices for paying late.

You can’t win here.