Yesterday was a bad day. It started well and it ended well, but there was a bit in the middle where I completely lost my footing.
At the end of last year, due to no fault of my own, a debt arose with my energy company at the time. I was paying every month by Direct Debit and as far as I knew they were taking the amount they needed. However they claim they had come out to the property and carried out a reading which showed the amount they were charging me was much lower than it should have been. Now you would think that at this stage they would have increased the Direct Debit (since the ability to take what one needs each month is what sets it apart from a Standing Order). They did not. Instead they made plans to leave my bill as it was for the remainder of the year (three months) and then increase the direct debit. Companies such as this claim various reasons for doing this. From my viewpoint this was done for one main reason only, to make their prices look better.
How?
Most of these companies advertise an average price that their customers pay per year. Lets say for example my Direct Debit each month was for £35. The first advisor I spoke to in their customer service team advised me that they did readings every three months. This was then refuted by further advisors and the collections team and they advised they were actually only obliged to carry them out every nine months. So for nine months I pay £35. Now lets say that the 'new amount' they will be taking is £65. A nine month delay in inspection, followed by a three month delay in increasing your Direct Debit means that after a year you have paid £420. Only it doesn't end there. Because by their calculations you were paying the wrong amount for 12 months, or not paying enough shall we say. You now owe them £360. But you owe them this AFTER 12 months, so the figure they take for their yearly average that customers pay is £420, NOT £780. This makes them look like a much better deal than they actually are. Also the money tacked onto the following year is technically 'debt', so does it count towards the new years advised figures of how much customers pay...?
In my case I couldn't carry the debt over and increase the next years Direct Debit as I moved house. It was actually only due to me moving that the whole situation was revealed. I simply called to advise them I was moving and they cheerily told me my final check out figure was in the hundreds! They asked me how I would like to pay, I advised them I wouldn't. This is still ongoing and I will detail how this unfolds in another post.
Back to Last Night...
I walked in the house and saw what I thought was a letter I had been waiting for. Upon opening it I discovered it was actually from a debt collection agency of sorts (formatted to look like a solicitors letter but clearly wasn't) and they were contacting me regarding a debt I had allegedly been previously advised they were obtaining. Needless to say this was not the case and what had been a pleasant enough day began to unravel. The company I owed money to was a company I had paid with some money I had come into approximately two years before. I called the company I originally had business with three times. On the first call I was told they could find no account in my name under any previous postcode and then I was cut of. This also happened on the second call. On the third call I asked for a call back before I lost my temper. The gentleman called back and managed to find my account but said it had been referred to an external agency and I had to deal with them. I declined to do this as I had no 'debt' and asked him to investigate. He declined to do this approximately 10 times. I asked for his manager, he said there was no point. I finally managed to get through to a person I can only describe as the poster girl for bad customer service. Melanie was rude, aggressive, ill informed, blase, unremorseful and unhelpful. Hailing from the collections team she told me I did owe, I needed to learn to listen and that she basically didn't care if I made a complaint about her. I'm ashamed to say I then lost my temper. I refused to speak to her any further and her manager will now be calling me back in approximately 7 days...I will post more as it unfolds.
The calm after the storm.
After an hour and 30 minutes of dealing with one of the rudest, most unhelpful companies I have come across in recent years I returned to normality. A colleague of mine is going on leave for a while and has a penchant for cheese. All things cheese. So I set to making her a cake shaped like a wheel of cheese along with 24 cupcakes. This was daunting since my comfort zone is cupcakes and I have only done extremely minimal cake decorating since leaving school. It took me until 1.30am to bake, carve, cool, crumb coat, ice and decorate it all. But all in all I am very happy with the results and, though extremely tired today, I am much more relaxed and the smile on the recipients face made any rude customer service executives seem irrelevant. The pictures aren't great as I need a camera charger so took them on my phone, but I love this cake and it put the shine back in my day!
