Utility Madness

Okay, moving to any new location requires you to go through a little work to set up your utilities in your new location. Some pain an delay is to be expected, but when you through Beijing into the mix, the results can be just befuddling.
We moved into our apartment with gaurantees that all the utilities would be hooked up when we arrived. Our landlord met us and our realtor to hand over a bunch of information. He told us that he had paid for at least 3-5 days of electricity and water and a month of gas. Additionally, he handed over a bunch of smart cards that we would use to buy more time. He told us that we could recharge the cards and buy electricity at the management office on the first floor.
So... what's different? Apparently, utilities in our apartment complex (and across Beijing) operate on a pre-paid system. You buy some number of units of a utility that are either credited to an account or placed on your smart card that you then use to recharge your apartment meter.
We thought everything would be easy until we realized that no cold air was coming from the vents (even though the AC was on). The next day (after recharging our AC), our electricity went out and the AC stopped working again! What's going on? The next few posts contain our experience for each of our utilities.