Dom Davis (The Blog)

When The Zozo and I were buying Little Cottage we discovered that its gas and electricity were being provided by nPower. Having previously decided that they were a bunch of thieving bastards I phoned Scottish Power the day we completed and asked them to take over our energy supply. They were more than happy to do this and the wheels were put in motion. A month later and everything was sorted from Scottish Powers side. nPower sent us a flurry of letters wanting to know why we were moving, trying to convince us they were cheaper and then, finally, that they no longer provided us power and the final bills would be along shortly. The final gas bill turned up some months later and was duly paid. A letter saying they were ‘having difficulty’ preparing our final electricity bill also popped up. How hard can it be? You’ve got a final reading from the last person to own the house, a final reading from us, you know how much you charge, surely you can work it out!

In the interim I’m getting calls every couple of months asking why I left nPower and did you know they could save us money. Each time I would inform them that they ripped off The Zozo and that basically they’d lost us as a customer. They’d then offer apologies and that would be that.

The last time this happened (last month) I was going to ask for our details to be removed from the marketing database and that they never call me again. I didn’t get a chance as the bloke hung up on me once I said “you’ve lost us as customers”. I didn’t swear, wasn’t shouting, just stating fact.

Yesterday an nPower letter arrived at the house. They’d finally (over 10 months late) produced a final electric bill… based on estimated readings… that was going to charge us more for electric in a month than I pay for gas and electric combined… and the period they’re charging me for is when the house was empty.

Let me run that by you again: nPower want me to pay more to run a fridge for a month (not kidding, most of the fuse box was actually turned off, the house was unoccupied, heating and hot water off, just the fridge running, not even the cooker clock was on) than Scottish Power want to charge me for gas an electric with 2 people living in the house (with the same fridge) after having adjusted our bill to cater for it being the coldest winter in God knows how long!

I know what’s happened, nPower have lost the final meter readings and are making them up from their “what we think a customer should be using so we can boost our revenue” tables. Well I’m not paying it. I shall be phoning them to complain and get the bill reduced today. I shall then be writing a letter of complaint demanding that they send me a written apology and that they, I’m writing, promise to never call or write to me again to pedal their overpriced electricity.

It was only the other day when I was saying life is great and isn’t giving me blogging material and yet here we are with nPower dropping something right in my lap. To avoid this being one very long shouty rant written over many days I’m going to present it as a number of shorter shouty rants posted as things happen. So, without further ado, some back story:

Before The Zozo and I lived together I was living in a large, 2 bed flat with electric heating and hot water, electric hob, large TVs, powerful computers on 24×7 and a lifestyle that ate through electricity. I was with Scottish Power and they charged me £50/month for this. When I left my flat they owed me £200.

The Zozo lived in a little 1 bedroom flat with gas central heating and water, gas hob and very little in the way of things that would eat electricity. nPower would charge her substantially more than £50/month for her electric and by the time she left she owed them a lot of money. Despite a number of calls complaining to nPower that things can’t be right they were insistent that there were no problems. Eventually they changed the meter but that didn’t help.

Personally I think either on of the other flats was stealing electric from The Zozo or there was a short somewhere. nPower didn’t care, they weren’t going to help, they just wanted the money. Whatever the problem was nPower now have their money and we’ll never touch them again with a barge pole.

Of course, it’s never that easy…

Last night The Zozo and I were subjected to the new 2010 advert for webuyanycar.com, a low budget affair that relies on the musical equivalent of malaria¹ to lodge itself in the brain. The lyrics of the tune as follows:

webuyanycar.com, webuyanycar.com, webuyanycar.com – any, any, any any.
webuyanycar.com – any make, any model, any age, any price, from fifty quid to a hundred grand.
webuyanycar.com, webuyanycar.com, webuyanycar.com – any, any, any any.
webuyanycar.com – buy a newer car and don’t part ex, you may get a better deal when you buy next.
webuyanycar.com – enter your reg number now at webuyanycar.com.

Most important to note is the ‘dot com’ part of ‘we buy any car dot com’ is said in a slightly different voice and it is this that makes the tune so hard to remove from the brain once it’s got lodged there.

This morning The Zozo and I have both been suffering from having this tune stuck in our brains and it’s not got to the stage where she will go ‘we buy any car’ and I will go ‘dot com’. Worse still, I’m not putting ‘dot com’ on the end of bloody everything [dot com]… see!!

I’m hoping the meme will burn itself out but in the mean time I’m trying not to go crazy with the little voice in my head going ‘dot com’ to everything [dot com]. Gaaaaahhhhh!!!! Make it stop!².

¹Highly infectious and not pleasant if you have it

²dot com

So today I had to pop into Norwich to go collect a load of polystyrene blocks¹. Since I’m not so hot on navigating around Norwich centre I just plugged the post code into the iPhone and got the TomTom app to navigate me there. Given where I was going was close-ish to the station I had assumed that it would take me the way it took me when I went to the cinema (also close to the station), but I was wrong. Instead it had me hang a left down a road I’d never been down before and go down some of the smaller Norfolk roads. This in itself isn’t a problem but I did manage to stuff up a turning (I turned right instead of bearing right) and ended up going down the smallest road ever, bracketed at each end with a sign saying ‘Mud On Road’, although ‘Mud Road’ would be closer to the truth. This is where the fun started.

At every turning into a field, (and there were a few) the mud became several inches deep which was worse than driving through thick snow as the tires kept sliding into the ruts and trying to follow them. Deciding that if I hit any of these patches at speed I’d end up in the field I backed off the speed and slowly pootled down the road at a crawl.

Next up was the white van. It was clear he wasn’t going to pull over so I was forced to slowly reverse half a mile to a passing place so I could let him pass, before slowly heading off again…

…only to meet someone else at almost exactly the same point. Deciding I wasn’t going to do the whole reverse and come back again I rather pressed the point of them moving only to discover there was a passing place just 50m down the road. Grrr!

Tiny roads navigated I started getting into suburban Norwich and then found myself having to go left onto the main road. Now this was a Sunday and traffic wasn’t too heavy but I was stuck there for 5 minutes until someone crossed at a pedestrian crossing just before the junction, mercifully stopping the traffic and letting me escape.

Deciding I didn’t like this new route² I just ignored the instructions for the first part of the journey home forcing it to take me the more usual way. Much better, and this time when signs said ‘Mud On Road’ the road was wide enough for two cars to pass and the ‘mud’ was nothing more than a couple of brown tractor tracks stretching a few inches onto the road.

¹for sitting people on when arranging them for portrait photography if you must know

²The TomTom does some kind of clever thing where it works out routes based not only the roads, but also average traffic conditions so routes can change depending on the time of day, or day of the week

So Specsavers decided that they would use Postman Pat for one of their advertising campaigns. The storyline, such that it is, is that Pat accidentally sits on his glasses and then proceeds to drive off trying to deliver the post but, ultimately, failing.

What could be wrong with using Postman Pat you ask? Nothing… you’d think. After all this is a children’s TV character. What could be more innocent than that? Well lets look at the facts shall we.

Pat sits on and breaks his glasses while getting into his van. So far so good. Pat then proceeds to drive off, not noticing that Jess, his black and white cat, is still on the bonnet of the van. He hits a road sign, leaves the road, crashes through a fence, then a brick wall before he looses the Jess (thankfully she seems unharmed) driving through a garden. The next scene shows Pat picking up a bag of vegetables instead of the bag of post and he then goes on to try to deliver said vegetables. Pat is last seen driving off after hitting a sign.

Ignoring, for the moment, that glasses could correct any kind of vision defect that would cause you to fail to notice a cat in your field of view, or mistake a bag of vegetables for a bag of post, Pat should have been aware of the fact that his eyesight was poor. As an upstanding citizen he would have reported the fact to the DVLA and would be issued with a driving license that would require him to wear glasses to drive. Pat ignores this and proceeds to drive while being unable to see. He then fails to stop at a number of accidents after causing hundred, if not thousands of pounds of damage.

Next, one has to question this persons lucidity. Regardless of if you could see or not, the act of striking road signs, fences and brick walls with a vehicle has got to be noticeable. One has to be criminally negligent, or on something, to fail to notice these events. This goes doubly for posting vegetables through a persons letter box. You could argue that the two sacks containing the vegetables and the letters were similar but when it comes to the contents their not even the same shape. To have a postman who is either so off his face, or who cares so little about his job so as not to notice that what he is holding is a large spherical object and not a thin rectangular one is just beyond comprehension.

Finally, given Pats complete inability to see anything, let alone read, coupled with the fact that the vegetables are not addressed how does he know which letter boxes he should be posting things through? He can’t, he’s just randomly distributing the contents of his bags.

So we have a criminally negligent, possibly high person who has broken a number of laws, destroyed property and woefully failed at his job being used as a spokes person for a company. I don’t know about them but I’d be distancing myself from Pat as soon as I could. I’m pretty sure that once the police become aware of the (readily available) evidence that Pat will be facing prosecution, not to mention the loss of his job.

There must be something about the Antipodes and the way that pretty much everything there wants to kill you (especially in Australia) that produces the likes of Steve Irwin (nutcase who used to pick up snakes while telling the audience just how many people a single drop of venom could kill – now dead) and The Lion Man (the nutcase currently on TV).

Now I don’t know about you, but I’m smart enough to realise that big cats, no matter how hand reared and friendly, are great fun to play with right up until the point that they get bored of you. You’ve seen house cats. They roll on their backs, do the whole friendly ‘lets play’ thing and are a big bundle of cute fluff right up until they get bored, the claws come out and they try to take off your hand. That’s a domesticated cat that’s much smaller than you. What happens when a big cat does that? Death. That’s what happens. But no, this bloke is playing football with lions, including Savannah; “…his favourite lion and the one most likely to turn on him”. Lets just revisit that shall we: “…the one most likely to turn on him”. So he knows there’s a chance they might decide to stop being friendly and, in a fight, my money is with the fully grown lion.

His wife seems to have slightly more brains as she’s decided that going into the enclosure to play football is not up there with the world most sensible ideas, then changes her mind, goes in, gets scared (really can’t blame her) and makes a quick exit.

I love big cats, I love watching them and photographing them, but most of all I love the sturdy fence between me and them. Lets just hope that the Lion Man doesn’t end up as Lion Food.

So today I went hunting for the most mythical of beasts: The cheapest advance fare National Express East Anglia ticket. For those not familiar with this operator (although I suspect all UK train operators are the same), when you log onto the website to buy advance fare tickets it helpfully tells you that you can get the tickets from ‘as low as £6′. This is a special online only price which is never available. Whenever I’ve booked tickets the cheapest has often been £9, but sometimes they’re even more depending what time you want to travel*.

Today, however, I managed to get that very beast. The cheapest of the cheap tickets, and all I had to do was book a ticket 3 months in advance on an off peak service. No doubt I got the only two tickets for that price so everyone else will have to pay the higher price (with the price getting higher and higher the closer you get to the day).

*there is the lunacy of the Monday morning Cromer to Colchester advance fare ticket which is more expensive than a first class ticket bought on the day, and more restrictive since you can only use it on the train you’ve booked it on

The red car and the blue car had a race - Good start, we’ve introduced the main players, identified the situation we’re in.

All red wants to do is stuff his face – OK, not exactly what you’d expect from a story involving two cars, but now we’ve anthropomorphised the cars and indicated that reds mind may not be entirely on the aforementioned race. Still, twists are what keep a story interesting.

He eats everything he sees, from trucks to prickly trees – Now this is a worrying development. A car, ordinarily, eats things derived from hydrocarbons. Since we have anthropomorphised these vehicles we’d possibly expect them to be eating human foods, but trucks and prickly trees are just completely left field and smack of a serious eating disorder. Think about it, here we have a vehicle that is so desperate to stuff it’s face with food that it will eat its own kind, namely a truck that is many times its size. This is very worrying.

But smart old blue he took the milky way – Great, so we’re congratulated blue for being ‘normal’. Never mind that red has a serious psychological disorder and is in need of help, no, smart old blue, doesn’t eat trucks. Isn’t he clever.

He’s looking for a chocolate treat fluffy and light – Talk about rubbing it in. Red probably has big self image problems and blue is simply thinking of himself and taunting red with his desire to eat chocolate. Furthermore, by describing it as a ‘treat’ we’re reinforcing the idea that blue is somehow better than red because he’s more normal.

Cos he knows it won’t spoil his appetite – Lies! When this was rereleased in 2009 the line was changed to ‘Cos he knows it tastes just right’. Why would they do that? The only reason I can think of is that advertising standards have got a lot more stringent since the advert was first released and they can no longer tell us that Milky Way won’t spoil your appetite (Yes, this tawdry tale of alienation against those with eating disorders is an advertisement for a chocolate bar which showed in the UK some years ago and was repeated last year… what did you think I was on about?) So what are they saying now? What is the message being put across now? A chocolate bar tastes nicer than prickly trees and trucks. Well duh!

Oh no! the bridge has gone, old red can’t carry on – Poor old red, just because he eats weird stuff he’s supposed to be a porker that can’t complete the race. What about blue? Blue stuffs his face with chocolate which, contrary to advice given in previous year, probably does ruin your appetite and, by extension, probably isn’t as good for you as was once implied.

But smart old blue, he took the milky way – which makes you realise that blue is an annoying suck up. Oh, smart old blue, isn’t he clever. Makes you wish the bridge went out with blue on it.