So How Bad can Bad be?
Read and weep till you have to laugh in despair....
I've highlighted the saddest parts"One customer who complained to MyCustomer.com received a bill for £750 for a one bedroom flat in which only the central heating was gas-powered. Energywatch told him that such a bill would be feasible for a large family house for an entire year, but was totally realistic as a quarterly bill for a one bedroomed flat.
While he attempted over a period of days to contact British Gas to question this, he received a series of letters from the company warning him that they would enter his premises with the police to recover the debt unless he replied within seven days. The letters were of course backdated to seven days previously!
When he finally did manage to get through to British Gas, he spent the first 40 minutes being passed from department to department. Eventually he was able to convince British Gas to send an engineer to look at the meter, which as he pointed out was clearly defective. On the appointed day, he took time off work after being told that the engineer would arrive between 10am and 4pm.
Inevitably, the engineer did not turn up. At 4pm the customer phoned British Gas only to be told that he had been misinformed and that the engineer was scheduled to come between 10am and 5pm. Come 5pm, still no engineer. The customer called back again and was told that he had been misinformed again and that the engineer was in fact due between 10am and 6pm.
British Gas then told him to call Transco, the outsourced engineering firm that dealt with this. He called them, only to be told by Transco’s call centre that – incredibly! – “We don’t have anything to do with British Gas.” When he asked what he should do now, the operator at Transco suggested he should call the National Grid.
The by now furious customer called back to British Gas and demanded to know if the engineering appointment had ever actually been made in the first place. The call centre operator happily told him that no appointment was booked on his customer record. Nor were there any records of his previous conversations with British Gas that day or earlier.
The operator also said that when – or if – the engineer had come out, he would have had to take away the meter which would then be destroyed during the fault testing process. If it was deemed not to be faulty, the customer would then be liable to pay £50 to have it replaced. This was all news to the customer who had not been informed of any of this before. When asked by the customer what proof he would have about whether there had been a fault or not if the meter had been destroyed, the call centre operator told him that he would have none."
Thanks to MyCustomer who has brought this tale of sorrow, this modern day Sisyphus to life!
