simont | (no subject)

Yesterday was a rather frustrating day on several counts.

For a start, on Sunday I had set up a particularly hard custom one-player Starcraft game against several computers, and won it on the first time of trying, so yesterday I tried to do it again quite a lot of times and was completely wiped out repeatedly. In the end it turned out that the computer had made a rare and vital mistake the first time which it never made again. I would have been perfectly happy to get wiped out every time I tried this; I'd have concluded that I'd bitten off more than I could chew and tried something easier. But to succeed with relative ease the first time and then get massacred repeatedly is particularly annoying! It's got that sort of ‘first time's free’ nature about it that sucks you in and gets you involved against your will.

Also yesterday I attempted to go to my local post office to do some administrative faff involving my food prescriptions, and was rather startled to discover the post office wasn't there any more and had turned into an ordinary newsagent when I wasn't looking.

When I got home from that abortive outing, I was even more startled to receive an electricity bill for nearly one and a half thousand pounds! On closer inspection it turns out that they arrived at this figure by switching round the day and night rates in the meter reading I provided recently; on even closer inspection it looks as if they have in fact been doing this ever since I moved in, and I didn't notice at first because the two readings started out roughly similar, and then continued not to notice because they've been estimating my bill (badly) and this is the first real reading they've had since 2003. So I rang up to complain and the guy on the phone said ‘oh dear, this is one for the specialist team I'm afraid’; so some time this morning I'm expecting a complicated phone call from a crack squad of full-time British Gas cock-up untanglers (what a job). Wish me luck. And probably them too.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

One of my former cow-orkers used to work for the debt-collection department at British Gas. I suspect you may well need a lot of luck.

That said, merely not swearing and making death threats will probably put you in the top 3% of callers by politeness, so they might be somewhat amenable. Here's hoping.

It's looking good at the moment; I phoned them after their specialist team didn't ring back, and although they aren't 100% on returning phone calls they apparently have come to the same conclusion as me about the origin of the bill oddity. So hopefully the hard part (convincing them I'm right and they're wrong) is past and it's now just a matter of them issuing a corrected bill and me paying it...

IIRC one friend of mine got so annoyed with them in the end that he went to their office and sat in it, refusing to leave until his problem was sorted out. I would have liked to have seen that.