Now that nPower had my £40 I thought I was in for a long and protracted period of letter writing that would start with them sending me the final statement and end with me getting satisfaction. As has happened many times during the saga I was, once again, wrong. Just as I was phoning the Chinese for my dinner my mobile rang. It was the minion from nPower. It turns out he’d made a mistake (I retorted with “I thought you had”). It turns out that the final bill was in fact nearer £2 and he’d worked out the amount that the current bill was over, not the amount I was supposed to pay. £2 sounds a lot more sensible for the usage we had over that month and certainly better than £40. Of course the £40 payment had already gone through so there they were having taken nearly a year to sort the bill out, with a final demand for an incorrect amount having not acted on my previous call and me being overcharged to the tune of 20 times the size of my bill. Not a strong bargaining position. They knew this and instantly started with the actions they were going to take to placate me. The £40 would be refunded in full. The bill would be cancelled. A letter of apology would be sent and a cheque for £25 would be issued.
Now in the grand scheme of things £25 may not seem like a lot but you’ve got to remember that I only had nPower providing energy for a month and the house was empty for that month. The gas bill was pence. The electric bill was nothing and they’re giving me money. nPower have actually paid me to use them… and I still wont ever touch them with a barge pole again.
The only downside to this resolution is that I don’t get to write my indignant letter of outrage demanding an apology and recompense, although I may still write once the cheque has come through and demand I get written confirmation that nPower will never contact my mobile number or home number ever again unless they’re going to give me more money.
If you remember the Zozo and I aren’t overly keen on nPower. They didn’t do themselves any favours in how they [eventually] handled our final bill, but after phoning them up and complaining it seemed all was sorted. I just needed to wait for the new final bill, pay it and write a letter of complaint. Simple right? Wrong.
Today I [eventually - thanks NXEA] got home to a letter from nPower. ‘Finally!’ I thought, ‘A revised bill’. I cheerfully opened it wondering how much the final bill finally was. Oh look, it’s exactly the same amount as last time. Except this time it’s a final demand and if I don’t pay it in 7 days they’re passing me to the debt collectors. Great.
Girding myself I grabbed the phone and headed upstairs to get the old letters and the meter readings so I could tell them again. Phoning the special number reserved for debtors, paupers and criminals I enquired as to why I was holding an unrevised final demand when I was supposed to be receiving a revised bill that I could actually pay. The minion on the phone has a look into my account notes and indicated there may well have been a mistake. Indeed there has. To his credit the minion then suggested we sort it there and then over the phone rather that letting it go back into the bowels of the process to then no doubt surface again in a couple of months with nothing having changed. Agreeing with him I preferred my mobile number so he could call me back at the most expensive rate possible. There was then much being on hold while various departments were called and I was finally put through to another minion in the complains department.
The new minion was armed with my incorrect statement, my final readings and a new, freshly created statement and had the authority to sort everything there and then. He informed me that the old bill was over by 7 units on the night rate and 2 units on the day rate which sounded very low and proceeded to work out the new cost. Instead of being just of £53 the new bill was… just over £51! But as a gesture of good will they were willing to reduce it to £40. Lets just take a moment to let that sink in.
£51 to run a fridge for a month. Which was going to be discounted to £40 to run a fridge for a month.
I informed the minion that I thought that was quite steep given what was being powered then versus what’s being powered now and the relative prices. The minion said that this was now off my meter readings so I grudgingly accepted the £40 offer and paid with my card. I then asked for a breakdown of the bill including the start readings, final readings, amount per unit, final total of £51ish and the final discounted amount of £40 all clearly marked. The minion agreed, the call was terminated and my thoughts turned to dinner (Chinese, yay!) and the stinking letter of complaint I was going to write about the scandalous prices nPower seemed to have charged both The Zozo and I for power. After all, I wanted my £40 worth from them, and I was going to get it.
Forget what I said in the last post, events have transpired that I need to rant about.
I have an annual season ticket printed, as with all annual season tickets, on the bog standard ticket stock using the normal printers. This fades with use going through the ticket machines. Why they don’t use the same plastic tickets they have for season direct I don’t know. I’d be willing to pay to have the paper ticket upgraded to a plastic one, even if it meant using a normal one for a week or two while waiting for the plastic one to be posted.
Anyway, every day I get on the train, every day the ticket inspectors either inspect the ticket, glance at it, point at me and give me a thumbs up because the recognise me or fail to notice me and don’t check the ticket (the latter two happen more in the morning when it’s quiet). Recently there have been incidents of the ticket inspectors taking a closer look at the ticket because it’s faded a bit, however, no one has told me I need to replace it (which is ball ache because it involves queuing at rush hour in the ticket office to get it sorted).
Until, that is today. One of the more regular conductors decided today that I’d have to take my ticket out of it’s holder so he could inspect it. He then declared it unreadable and told me I’d have to buy a ticket. When I asked why he told me it was because the destination station was not visible. It’s not been visible for about a month. I’ve had many season tickets where it’s not visible, it’s one of the first things to go. When the ruddy great big expiry date stops being visible, that’s when people start complaining. Never in my decade plus of commuting have I ever been faced with that argument. I’ve also never been forced to buy a ticket, I’ve always been told to get it sorted soon, and I have. Nope, jobsworth is having none of it. I have to buy a single ticket to Cromer. Great. What if I don’t have any money? Well then, it turns out, I get treated like a fare evader and would be treated the same way someone with no ticket who refused to buy one would be, i.e. like a common criminal. I paid.
I also asked would I have to pay to get into Norwich tomorrow and got met with a smug “If the conductor is doing their job correctly and not just glancing at the tickets then yes”. In other words if another jobsworth is on the train in the morning I’ll need to buy another ticket. It’s ‘OK though’, because I can get the tickets refunded. Well that’s fine, except getting a refund on a ticket is bigger ball ache than getting the ticket changed. I can see me wasting half an hour tomorrow all because some git (who has inspected my ticket already thus week I should point out) is in a bad mood.
Grrrrrrrrrrr!
For the past 4 years I’ve used my mobile as my primary telephone number. The land line is really just for broadband, although the mobile reception in Little Cottage is a bit crap so we have started encouraging people to call the landline if there’s no answer on the mobile. Even so I couldn’t really tell you what the ring on the home phone sounds like, I hear it so infrequently. Which is why, when it rings at 00:40 it’s causes such confusion.
Here’s the scene. The Zozo and I sound asleep with that serenity being shattered by a noise. A few seconds confusion while we try and work out what’s going on followed by me getting out if bed to pick up the phone. It’s dark and the handset doesn’t light up when you pick it up. I can’t find the answer button. The phone goes to voicemail. Now we’re both awake and wondering what’s wrong and who’s calling.
I turn my mobile on in case someone is trying to get hold if me. The Zozo does 1471. Number withheld. She checks the message. Nothing. It’s a fucking automated dialler. Some bastard machine has called our number so that, on the off chance that we answer and there is an ‘agent’ free, some Indian sat in a call centre half way round the world can try to sell me something I have no interest in buying.
Does it matter that were on the TPS scheme? Does it fuck! To report the company you need to get some details from them which the ‘agents’ have been trained not to give. It’s not “Hello this is Mahindra from Annoying Corp.”, it’s “Hello sir, let me feed you some shit about why you need to buy something from me”. With a withheld number you can’t report them.
I’ve even had them phone up claiming my computer has returned diagnostic information that it’s booting up too slowly. Utter shite, especially when the ‘agent’ couldn’t tell me the make or model of my computer. They wanted me to ‘click start’ and pass that info to them. Firstly, if it’s calling some remote helpdesk to say it’s got problems then you have that information and secondly it’s a Mac. There is no start button, so kindly fuck off! I did get him to admit that he couldn’t help me because I didn’t have a Windows machine and that my computer didn’t cause them to call but I never got the company name to complain about them.
So here we are. An hour later. It’s nearly two in the sodding morning and I can’t get back to sleep, all thanks to some stupid fucking sales company and their bloody auto dialler. I want to hurt someone1!
1Given the state of this country on how the authorities can blow the simplest figure of speech way out of proportion I should probably point out that this is just a statement of frustration and not a threat, implied or otherwise, against any person or persons, living or dead. Anyone taking it as such is hereby admitting that they are a moron of the highest caliber and unfit to make judgement against me.
Knowing full well it was going to rain today (the rain falling on my head when I left the house this morning gave it away) I decided to take my big brolly and see if I could keep dry, blog and walk in a straight line all at the same time. The answer is ‘no’. I found this out on the way to the station during my usual morning Facebook and the phone was still getting wet despite the big brolly.
Being the selfless kind of guy I am I forewent watching my James May Toy Stories and fired off a blog entry in the comfort on the train. So why, you may ask, am I blogging now and what has all this got to do with cyclists? The answer is simple: it’s not raining. Since it’s not raining I can happily walk along, headphones on, head down, phone taking up most of my vision completely unaware of anything more that a few meters in front of me and nothing behind me. Given the speed I walk the only thing wanting to overtake is cyclists. Since the path is clearly marked with signs saying ‘no cyclists’ (it used to be even more clearly marked but people keep destroying the signs) I don’t have to feel guilty that I can’t hear their pathetic bells pinging away1 or that I force them onto the grass to get round me. They shouldn’t be there and all the pathetic pinging isn’t going to stop me blogging. Nope, it’ll make me do it more because that’s just the kind of guy I am 
1 The air horns, on the other hand, are enough to scare the hell out of anyone. I challenge anyone not to jump when one of those goes off half a meter behind you when you’re not expecting it, no matter how loud or good your headphones.
Dear visitor to Norfolk,
Welcome to our county. Please note that, just like the rest of the country, the speed limit is 60mph on single carriage way and 70mph on a dual carriage way unless otherwise indicated. Speed limits are always expressed in miles per hour, not kilometres per hour. With this in mind if you are thinking of visiting our fair county and plan to drive at a constant 20 miles per hour under the speed limit when driving conditions are fine We would kindly ask you to fuck right off. Seriously, piss off to Cornwall or something. We really don’t want you here. You’re annoying and your inability to drive at anything remotely like the speed limit is dangerous because the long queue of cars behind you (and it’s a very long queue now, you bastard) get more and more desperate to overtake and take more and more risks. And the risk taking is not just to get past you, we now so pissed off with you that we don’t care if our overtaking manoeuvre ends with us piling into an oncoming car because the resulting fiery ball of death with take you out as well and we will be heralded as heroes by those stuck behind us and you will be dead, which is an end that is too good for you.
Learn to drive before I’m forced to drop the C bomb.
Love and kisses,
Dom (currently a passenger with The Zozo who is currently stuck behind some prat with low profiles, tinted windows and an inability to drive over 45mph. My next car is having missile launchers)
You know it’s going to be a fun journey when you get on the train and your olfactory senses are overwhelmed with The Lynx effect cranked up to the power of 11. That, or the thick fog of someone who’s obviously marinaded in Pretention For Men overnight. It’s kind of understandable if it’s some 14 year old kid trying to impress a girl but when it’s a middle aged bloke you can’t help but think that they should know of the miraculous properties of soap.
I guess I can take comfort in the fact that they didn’t deploy half a can of deodorant on themselves while actually on the train, gassing everyone close by. Something that seems to happen with alarming regularity in the office.
You1 sit the other side of the office to me, and yet your music is on so loud I can actually identify the song you’re listening to from the sound being leaked from your headphones. Either buy better headphones or turn it down. It can’t be doing your hearing any good at all and it’s annoying the hell out of me. *bum tish bum tish bum tish*
In the interim I shall plug myself into my headphones which a) don’t leak any sound so I can listen to my iPod with it turned up to 11 without annoying people and b) stops sounds from the outside world from leaking in meaning I don’t need to crank up the iPod to 11 unless I want something to be deafeningly loud.
1There’s two of you actually, thankfully not both at the same time
It would seem that these days there are three types of company: those that have embraced the Internet to a greater or lesser extent; those who haven’t; and those who claim to have embraced it but haven’t really. It’s the last lot that annoy me. I’m currently sat on a couple of emails to two different companies, both of whom list an email address in their contact details, and neither email has got a reply. Makes you wonder how many unanswered emails are sitting in their inboxes. What makes it worse is that one of the companies also list two phone numbers. Both these go to voicemail which, given the nature and size of the company (I’m guessing 1 person) is going to mean us playing answer phone tennis until such point as we’re both free to take a call at the same time. Email would be so much easier. The other company is my solicitors and it’s a discussion I’d rather have in writing so there can be no confusion. I’ll have to do it snail mail now which will take far longer.
OK, so if these companies hadn’t listed email addresses I would have to go the old skool route anyway, but at least I wouldn’t be sat there thinking there’s an easier way to do this and I wouldn’t have wasted time waiting for replies that obviously aren’t coming.
So, having received my very late, overly optimistic bill from nPower I called them today at my earliest convenience. I was asked to press 1 if I had a prepay meter… nope; 2 if I paid monthly by cash… nope; 3 if I paid by monthly direct debit… nope; or 4 if I paid by quarterly standing order… sod it, close enough. The call was answered quickly by a native English speaker which is always a bonus (one of the things I love about Scottish Power is their call centres are all in Scotland and you get a soft Scottish accent which is pleasing to the ear when you call them up) by someone who was only to happy to help, and apologise, and would I like to give her the meter readings from today so they could generate a new bill. I countered with a suggestion of giving her the meter readings from when they stopped supply me electricity in August last year rather than getting charged for months of electricity usage provided by another company. This seemed acceptable to her, the numbers were duly noted and more apologies were forthcoming. I was then offered to be transferred to the complaints department as she was in full agreement that I shouldn’t be happy with the situation as things stood. I declined stating that I also wanted to complain about other things too. I was told I could complain about everything all at once and I thanked her but declined since I wanted all further communication to do with the complaints to be in writing so I had a record.
Much as I would have loved to have gone ‘RAAAAAARRRR!’ over the phone it’s not the fault of the person in the call centre, she did apologise profusely and did everything in her power to sort things out. No, I want to go ‘RAAAAAAARRRR!’ at management. While I wait for my amended bill I feel the start of a letter coming on: Dear sirs….