grumpyf1

I sn’t it comforting to know that, despite all the negative publicity, complaints and anger, some of our largest companies are still arrogant enough to put the customer last? T he energy company at the centre of my story has successfully maintained a track record of coming last in customer satisfaction surveys. I should have guessed further errors were on the cards, after a couple of previous foul-ups had left me baffled as to how anyone could think what they were doing was acceptable. S ure – when you first buy a house and sign-up with the utility firm, they aren’t going to know how much gas you’re going to gobble, or electricity you’ll eat through. After a few years, it seems reasonable to assume they would now have enough data to know that if they needed to vary your direct debit payments, it should only be by a few quid to balance things out. N ot my supplier. 8 years into our ‘relationship’, I’ve had refunds after it turned out I’d massively overpaid, then had my payment ...

3 years ago this very week, the winner of the North West Evening Mail’s “Big Blogger” contest was announced, and I’m delighted to say... it wasn’t me! I received a Direct Message on Twitter a couple of weeks ago that startled me greatly. It’s OK though – it turns out it was a mistake and @BigTrish66 isn’t going to scratch my eyes out for looking at her boyfriend. I then received an even more startling message than the first, from fellow columnist Darren McSweeney, giving me the heads-up that he was about to announce his retirement from columnising (or whatever the official word is for what we do each week) for this fine paper. Swirling back through the mists of time to the 9th of April 2012, it’s possible to make out two handsome and highly intelligent bloggeristas, who had successfully seen off a large field of competitors in the equivalent of a weekly blogging smack-down, to reach the head to head final. (In case you were wondering, I’m referring to me and Darren. Obviously....

Happy 99th birthday, BST! Being confused as to whether your clock should spring forwards or fall backwards is nothing new, but why do it at all? Last weekend saw the clocks go forward by an hour, depriving us of one forty-eighth of our weekend, and ensuring a sizeable percentage of the UK’s oven clocks are now wrong for the next six months. We’ve been fiddling about with our time in a non-Doctor Who kind of way for almost a century, and since 1995 have agreed that, along with straight bananas, all of Europe does exactly the same thing at the same point. You say tom-AY-toes, I say Central European Summer Time. When William Willet suggested the complex idea of moving the clocks forward by 80 minutes in 20 minute Sunday increments during April, he was presumably unaware that his impending demise would mean he never got to see the benefits of extra light in the evenings. Much of this would probably have been lost resetting all the clocks though, so what we finally got was a 60 m...