rant

[supertinks]

So I get an email the other day telling me to submit my gas and electricity meter readings. I go online, enter my readings, get my bill. We have currently overpaid by about £16, with our monthly direct debits of £82.50. I get an email today, saying "we've looked at your account and don't think you're direct debit is big enough to cover your bills. So we're upping it to £94 a month".

I call the number, go through all the automated menus and security, to be told "we are sorry, our customer services advisors are currently dealing with a high volume of calls and they're all busy. Please call again later" and it hangs up on me!

I want to hold, dammit!

Not surprised they're dealing with lots of calls, if they've just upped everyones direct debits again though.

Comments

[black-faery.livejournal.com]

*boggles*

How the hell are you paying that much?! Ours just went up from £45 to £55, but your house isn't bigger than ours! Blimey.

Also, grrr for hanging up on you.

(Can you tell I'm in a slacking mood today?)

[supertinks.livejournal.com]

hehe

you have double glazing and probably proper insulation, as your house is much newer than ours. we have eggshell thin walls, and sash windows that don't fit properly, and electric wiring that was probably installed back when electricity was first invented (most of the power sockets are made of bakelite!)

we have no roof insulation at all, and all of the pointing in the brickwork is falling apart. so our house leaks heat like no tomorrow. plus we have a ridiculously inefficient hot water/heating system.

so we do use a lot of gas/leccy.

[rwstagg.livejournal.com]

I doubt *anyone* has a good thing to say about monthly direct debits, some bloke on a forum was £730 in credit and they wanted to increase his monthly debit by £50 or more.

Hate energy companies. It took me 15 months just to get them to even give me a gas account number, and by then they'd lost the reading I gave them when I moved in. There's no wonder that energy prices are so high when they must lose millions in power that they never bill. Unfortunately I screwed up reading the meter (for some reason it has 3 numbers after the decimal point rather than 2, which seemed just plain wierd) so of course, I've now got a bill for 10 times as much as it should be, and trying to organise someone to read the meter when I can get time off work is near impossible. I tried to explain this, in an e-mail as I thought I'd have more luck than with some muppet on a phone, but they didn't have a clue, they just went off on a tangent about something else.

[tipofdoom.livejournal.com]

This is largely why I don't use direct debits to pay my bills, with the exception of my mobile.

I like to know how much is going out each month so even if it was going i'd still log on to my bank account to check my balance and if I'm doing that I might as well spend the extra ten seconds it takes to pay my bills online.

I used to work for Powergen about 8 years back and they used to pull this shit all the time, call centre's would be flooded with irate customers.
Only job I've ever got up from my desk and walked out on, along with about 15 others at the same time, much to the panic of the floor manager.

[putrescine.livejournal.com]

This is probably a bad time to point out that I've been living in my apartment for just shy of a year now and have yet to receive an electricity bill.