MortiBlog

Been a while since I’ve written here but that’s largely because it’s been a while since I’ve written anything of value.

These days I am being impressed by the stupidity of my electricity and gas companies for different reasons. Nicely, at the moment at least, their failings are working in my favour but I’m still paranoid it’s only a matter of time until they bite me on the arse. Here their incompetence is detailed through the medium of the “vaguely amusing anecdote”.

In my house we have not paid an electricity bill for six months. Over a year ago now my good friend John left the house to move elsewhere and left the electricity bill in his name. We made the request to change the name on the bill shortly after he left but for a few months continued to pay the bills anyway while they were in his name and the electricity company (naming no Southern Electric) were being useless and not changing it. We decided to stop paying them until they started charging the right person (me) and this process took a good six months. It perhaps makes a statement about the responsibleness our society that the company failed to understand the request of “please charge me the money rather than someone else”.

So after six months of Jo calling them and failing to get them to change the name I manage it in one phone call because I am scary or worded the request better or something. For some reason they were trying to get Jo to fax them tenancy agreements and things. Something I should explain, the department we were dealing with has its call centre in Scotland but the company has only one fax machine and it’s in Cardiff. But I digress, one week after they change the name I receive an envelope from them containing three bills. One is about £450, the other is about £650 and the other is -£34.02. Yeah, that’s a minus there and (as they confirmed when I called to query this) it’s that bill that turned out to be correct and they sent me a cheque. After six months of not paying them and them sending us increasingly large numbers they received a meter reading from us (although neither me nor Jo actually gave them one, we reckon it was either an angel or our other housemate and if you know our other housemate at the time you’d know an angel is far more likely) and realised they owe us money. Not entirely sure how that works, we’re not complaining.

The gas people are interesting too. We have EDF supplying our gas who took over gas duties from Southern Electric in February 2006. For a while after they got involved we were giving EDF regular meter readings and they still sent us estimated bills. In one phone call to them querying this it turned out they had the wrong type of meter on file for us and refuse to believe us when we say otherwise (the “no, it’s in front of me and it looks like this” argument fails to wash when their database says different). Consequently every month they send an estimated bill and we call up to tell them it’s wrong and request a non-estimated one. Then we give them readings and they get confused and just freeze our account. I think we’ve had our account frozen a few times now.

Today I got a bill through the post from Southern Electric claiming to be a gas bill for 1st February to 13th February. It was £193. Turns out they had their estimated reading for us from January but when the companies changed over in mid-February EDF sent them a reading back in order that they could charge us for a period while we were with them just before the changeover. It apparently didn’t occur to them that it wasn’t entirely likely we’d owe them nearly £200 for two weeks of gas, although bearing in mind this was February 2006 I don’t think they’d actually billed us this amount before then. I called to query it, they worked out what the bill should be based on old estimates they had for our meter at around that time and worked out we owed them… 0. Exactly nothing because we’d already (probably around the time) paid what was the “correct” estimate and what EDF had said is that, for the two week period, we should have paid £193 in addition to that. This gives some idea of how much EDF are trying to overcharge us and why we’re not paying them until they can give us a bill that isn’t an estimate based on some weird numbers they’ve made up. CUrrently neither we nor they have any idea what we actually owe for our gas usage.

So for six months we have not paid for gas or electricity and the electricity company has given me thirty quid. I realise this blog entry perhaps isn’t entirely exciting but I think this is about the most fun you can have with utility bills.

Currently I’m offline (for the most part) due to my failing to pay BT (again, slightly odd that these are the times I choose to update my blog). I’ve paid them now, just waiting until Monday when I can call up my ISP (Eclipse, who I have written about in another entry). This has it’s good and bad points, the bad is that O2 charge me £10 a month for a paltry 20MB of data transfer but on the flip side it’s kinda funky that I can leave my phone in my pocket while my laptop uses it as a modem. It’s been many years now since it was introduced but bluetooth is still cool.