He Called The Wrong Number.
Should have dialed 0118999881999119725-3
It's no secret that the UK's smart meter rollout has been a bit, well, shit – whether it's the buggers befuddling Saxons by deciding to start speaking Welsh or simply the fact that the project is perennially delayed and over budget. "A dog's breakfast," you might say, and indeed one economist has said exactly that. Now the …
Could also depend on the call centre person - given lots of call centres calls end up processed hundreds or thousands of miles away, then its the sort of thing could easily be misinterpreted by someone in East Europe, India etc. as if English is not your first language (even if it is!) tongue in cheek humour can easily be missed.
Though if it was someone with "UK native" language / humour interpretation skills on the other end of the phone then would agree with Tigra 07 that it was a bit of P taking
Actually guys you are *dead* wrong.
In many UK call centres there is a protocol that requires the agent handling the call to alert a team leader or similar if they become concerned about the health and wellbeing of a caller - either physical or mental. This can and does lead to concerns being passed on to the relevant emegency service - its considered to be "better safe than sorry" in these cases
This probably wouldnt happen with an overseas call centre and is another reason that they are a bad idea that often produces a worse customer experience than a UK based centre.
Yes. I worked for one of the Big Six energy companies and the call centres (in the north of England) had rules about what to do if they thought they were dealing with a Situation on the other end. And some of the staff were truly lovely people and would call the Police or emergency services if they felt something was seriously strange. I thought it quite nice.
A Baker friend, many years ago had a three phase supply. Two meters duly record electricity use and the third ran backwards and generated a refund. The supplier was told many times. "Don't be daft sir!". We could see the meter was clearly marked substandard. Again, "Don't be daft sir. The inevitable happened and the meter recorded past zero to however many nines. Even then it took them a while to understand what they could clearly see but they did admit such a bill was impossible.
YMMV - I just switched to them, no requirement for a "smart" meter, still the cheapest deal I could find, and in theory all green electricity, too. I'm happy with that.
OTOH, Enstroga, who I switched away from (I didn't choose them, just bought a house they were supplying), I could quite easily see them giving a customer a heart attach as they are a steaming pile of turds - trying to block my transfer unless I gave the my bank details. Stay away from them!!
Quite possibly, but I'm ready with my "demoralise a sales rep" spiel about the cost/benefit of the devices, and on the first call I'll ask it to at least get noted on the account that I don't want one. EDF did the same thing in my last house, but seemed capable enough to block such sales calls once I'd politely pointed out that I didn't want one (having built it to high spec so there wasn't actually anything I could do to reduce consumption)
I've had them call me up and say that by law I must have a smart meter installed before [whatever the date is]. I politely remind them that the government put the onus on the electricity companies to provide all their customers with a smart meter by [whatever that damn date is], and that I'm not obliged to accept one. *crickets*
Next time, though, I must make a note of that damn date because it's really bugging me that I can't remember it now!
People I got switched to after my original provider went bust are doing this - in a more subtle way.
I get a letter asking for a meter reading EVERY month.
I can only assume they think I will get a smart meter just to avoid the hassle.
In actual fact, I havent bothered giving them a reading in nearly 2 years.
I probably owe them quite a lot by now.
sent a letter stating that their fitter was going to fit a smart meter on 8th November and asked me to confirm that date or change it. Note no option (offered) to cancel it permanently.
So i called them :
Me : I don't want this meter fitting on the 8th.
They : Ok, would you like to change the date?
Me : Yes please.
They : Oooooh great, (shuufles about in their seat), what date would you like Sir?
Me : 29th February 2057
Bastards hung up didn't they.
I rang that department at EOn prior to leaving hoping there might be some price flexibility but they offered worse rates than shown on their website! Apparently phoning in person precludes better web self-service rates.
I concluded they needed to sweat all their existing punters at the expense of losing a few. Hello Bulb.
We see our pensions go up in pennies, the bills go up in pounds.
Maybe, oh I don't know, stop voting Tory then, and some more money might start going towards pensions, rather than tax-gifts to the rich. (the amount going on state pensions this year is apparently £96Bn, which isn't very much in the scale of things, a little over 10% of the total spending in the UK's budget, although it's still more than 7 times the amount that we actually "send to"* the EU).
*"send to" is a misleading term, as any competent economist will point out that the benefits to the economy (i.e returns on that investment) are estimated at anywhere between 5 and 15 times that amount. In other words, when (if) we leave the EU, the benefits we'll lose would probably have paid for those pensions...
"binary contrarian voting"
I *would* have voted for lord buckethead in the last general election, if I had had the choice to do so.
However, given the constituency I live in, I actually had to chose which of two parties I really, really, really, didn't want and vote for the other one. Had I voted for the party I wanted to, the lot I really didn't want might have got an MP, because it was a pretty close run poll. This is not a perfect system of democracy.... *Please* can we have a system of proportional representation like that used in the EU elections.
(the amount going on state pensions this year is apparently £96Bn, which isn't very much in the scale of things)
According to this website, UK expenditure on pensions is £160bn this year. Now it's about 60% higher than you thought, is that enough?
"Maybe, oh I don't know, stop voting Tory then, and some more money might start going towards pensions,"
It's also a lie though. Because of the ridiculous and unaffordable triple lock, pensions must go up at the fastest of 2.5%, wages and inflation. Thus pensions will always go up at least as quickly as tax contributions, assuming constant burden. Since longevity increases, you have one of a few options:
1) Increase pension age rapidly, none of this one year here one year there nonsense. Add ten years on.
2) Continually increase the tax burden on workers until they all give up and leave, then use another option.
3) End the triple lock.
4) Kill off some pensioners.
The Triple Lock was due to be reduced to a Double Lock increase in 2020, now put back to at least 2022. This would remove the 2.5% minimum, and leave the CPI and Average Earnings factors, but as it happens, both last year and this, Average Earnings were up 4% in the months July - September, so the 2.5% factor does not come into it. Obviously, if the AE factor drops to less than 2.5%, then that factor will come into force again, until whichever government we have in place in 2022 decides to do something different.
5) Raise taxation to pay for better pensions. I know that nobody wants to pay more taxes, and for the poorest, any raise affects the disproportionately, so here's a crazy idea - tax people with more than enough more. If they dont; like it and want to move somewhere else, then fair enough, as long as we close all those off-shore tax loopholes that our country is one of the worst in the world for allowing to happen...
That pensons account for 6.9% of Gov expenditure and that should drop to 6.1% by the time
e they increase the pension age to 70. That forecast does not include "shrinkage" induced by Brexit tho. Never heard anyone explain whther these displays are actually good enough to monitor the usgae/power of single appliances eg gaming PC and reduce said usage to save them money building power stations .
You can't be jocular with anyone anymore. Anything you say will be used a a lever against you somehow, be it in a sleet of "Insert Favorite Red Button Issue-ism" accusations on Twitface, Arsebook etc or straw man attacks on same for any bloody thing the read imagines can be got away with on the thinnest excuses.
Go on. Fire away.
When Mum died, we were going through her papers and discovered she was a couple of hundred pounds IN CREDIT. Going back through old bills, we discovered that one meter reading was distinctly odd. Checking the old dial meter, the reader had read one of the higher wheels a being just past a number, but alternate wheels ran in opposite directions and the real reading would have been just under... hence one big bill taken by direct debit and subsequent bills being massively in credit (unfortunately she was getting to the point where she was easily confused and possibly didn't notice... she certainly doesn't appear to have spoken to anyone about it)
(strangely the meter readers could get in to read the electric meter but always failed to read the gas meter which was outside... they could simply have asked!)
Quote
(strangely the meter readers could get in to read the electric meter but always failed to read the gas meter which was outside... they could simply have asked!)
When settling up my father's estate , we had a taste of what he had to put up with. being SSE and their meter readers for his lockup
Got a estimated bill for 1000 units because "they couldn't access the meter" (they were always doing this)
Insisted we paid up...... but then we pointed out the meter was in a locked box... on the end of the lockup and we did not have a key to the box, but SSE meter readers did, and in any case , dad had been dead for the past 3 months and highly unlikely to have used any power....
Finally handed the matter over to the solicitors when SSE threatened court action.....
Arseholes...
My mother died last January, gas company served the estate a bill for £40,000. This was in spite of there being no functioning gas appliances in the house for 3 years. Seems their agent had misread one of the digits on the meter 4 years back and when I provided the final reading it was lower than that previous one. They deduced that the meter must have hit 999999 and looped back around to reach the "lower" number. Took 2 months to get them to correct that.
Nice to see an energy company showing some concern for their customers - bit of a contrast to the experience I had with the complete shower of c***ts that is Scottish Power.
Another customer had not been paying their bills a few years and for reasons best known to themselves, Scottish Power just stuck that person's arrears onto my account, leaving me seemingly thousands of pounds in their debt. I spent a long time and many, many phone calls trying to get the matter resolved to no avail.
I remember one particular call where I was told something along the lines of "yeah, whatever, someone will call you in the next 7 to 10 days". I explained that I'd been told that plenty of times before, but nobody ever did contact me - I wanted to speak to someone now to get the matter resolved. I said that this was all their mistake, and I was finding the situation of being seen to be heavily in debt like this very stressful. I suffer with depression, this whole thing had triggered me into self-harming again, I was starting to have suicidal thoughts,
Their response was still "yeah, whatever, someone will call you in the next 7 to 10 days"
Heartless f***ers. I still have the scars from that little episode.
So, kudos to E.on for actually giving a toss
After a lot of grief, I got the regulator involved (a process which brings with it its own delays). SP agreed to cancel the erroneous debt and provide me with a derisory amount of money as compensation. I told the regulators that I found the compensation payment insulting, and wanted a full explanation and apology for what had happened. As a result I got f*** all money and a one line letter from SP saying (and I'm quoting more-or-less verbatim here) "we apologise for an error on our part".
At the risk of repeating myself, a complete shower of c***s
First you have to escalate through their procedures, then when that inevitably fails, you have to ask for a deadlock letter or have waited 6-8 weeks, then you can go through the CAB (jolly nice people), and then you can go through Ofgem.
Had to do most of this to get a transfer out from Enstroga done. I think their customer service playbook is to not let you do anything to try and hang on to the account as long as possible. Expect/hope they'll to go bust soon...
"...the complete shower of c***ts that is Scottish Power."
With you there. I'd NEVER have become one of their customers if after ExtraEnergy went bust Ofgem hadn't decided to hand my account over to them without consulting, well, anyone as far as I can tell -- unless maybe they took a nice fat back-hander^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H fee from the complete shower of c***ts in Spain.
Anyway, enough ranting.
Let's call them SPANISH because that's what they are, not Scottish.
And c***nts as well, of course, because they're that too.
And fraudsters, 'cause they make up bills that have no basis in reality and then threaten the customer with extra fees, visits from debt collectors, credit default and you fucking name it and they'll fucking do it to further their fucking protection racket.
C***NTS!
I was driving past a house once when there was a boom and the back of my car "shifted" a bit in a direction it really should not do. The house is still there, no one was killed and the blinds and curtains were strewn across the road. It was all quite surreal and DOES NOT happen in slow motion like in films and TV.
I got a bill recently for way more than our usual tab. It turned out that the meter reader, bless their cotton socks, read 60994 as 61994, 1000 kWh over. It's understandable with the old-style meter we have, where each digit is read from a pointer against a small dial, the dials go alternately in opposite directions, and you're supposed to take to lesser of the two numbers that the dial pointer is between. With the impending turnover from the 60900's to the 61000's, the thousands pointer was oh-so-close to the "1", but the reader should have known that for 61994 the pointer would be closer to the "2".
Well, you pay peanuts.....
In the current climate of blame the its not sueprising that EOn reacted this way .... just imagine the headlines if he'd actually had a heart attack and he'd saif that EOn call centre had ignored him and left him to possibly die
A few years ago I did a first aid course and the trainer talking about how to deal with injured people talked about how he'd had an accident at work where he'd broken some ribs (fell off back of a lorry and landed on phone in a chest pocket) - story was to explain how not to leave someone lying on cold concrete bvut he said he was impressed how fast ambulance came and one of the people on the course said they were an ambulance dispatcher and when someone phoned 999 and was asked if the person had chest pains they would ahve said yes (obviously from cracked ribs) and "middle-aged man with chest pains" would have matched "potential heart attack" and triggered a high priority blue-light ambulance dispatch!
My octogenarian mum fell for the decades old "Press One Scam" this week. A cold caller claiming to be a CEO eventually persuaded her to press 1 on her phone to save her internet. Probably cost her, but worse, now she is top of the scammers list. I scolded her for her naivety and she blocked that number.
Tonight, at black o'clock, the phone rang and I answered to nothing. Just a nuisance call of silence waking my parents. And then again 15 minutes later. I take it is a revenge attack for blocking the original number which I don't know, but this number is 08005875290. I advise you all to block it in advance, on your phones and your relatives phones, as I now have. I'll find out the original scam phone number tomorrow and report back if anyone is interested, and try to progress this with my parents phone company.
Do you have a 'reverse number lookup' website?
Here in Oz we have a couple of sites that let you put in the phone number and it tells you who or where the call is from and if (if known) it is a scam/spam caller.
Very handy for blocking numbers when my elderly parents were alive especially mum, who had 'old timers' and I hated the thought of any c*%t taking advantage of her.
Unfortunately, political parties are exempt from the listings.
I would check a minor-nuisance number like that. In this case your impression is well-supported. Other times a number might be spoofed and random.
My recently installed not very smart meter occasionally takes the notion of displaying realtime readings that are a factor of 1000 out (in their favour obviously). I have a handy photo of it showing 10MW usage (on an 80Amp supply) should it ever come up.
Icon cos that's the state the cable head would have been in