Gas firm in hot water shock

If you paid someone to make you a wedding cake, and they took your money but delivered it two weeks after the wedding, you’d be pretty annoyed.

If, after that marriage failed dismally because your partner just couldn’t forgive you for the cake debacle, you were getting married again and the cake showed up 4 weeks late, you’d be livid (and possibly wondering why you decided to go back to the same cake creator after the first incident).

Whilst not quite as ruinous to my relationship – I’m pretty OK at that without outside assistance – my energy supplier is pulling a similar stunt. I won’t give away their name, but they supply Gas, and they’re British.

Anyway, living in a draughty old house whose windows were installed immediately after glass had been invented, I really need to know that my boiler will be in tip top shape, and there for me when I really need it.

To help with this, I have one of those monthly payment insurance schemes, with rapid emergency call out should something go hideously wrong with the heating and the inside temperature makes a valiant attempt to match the outside during the depths of winter. Splendid, right? OK, it’s expensive, but it does include an annual boiler service.

Unfortunately, that’s where the wedding cake comparison heats up. I recently received a letter saying it was time to book my annual service. When I checked, the last service actually took place 14 months ago. Cheeky, that. On checking back, I realised that the pattern over the last few years is remarkably similar – the letter doesn’t arrive until a year and two months after the last visitation by an engineer.

Annoying as that is, when I went to their handy online-booking-platform-interface-web-thing, it advised me that there were no weekend slots available. What, ever? I need a new calendar. Maybe I can just slice Saturday and Sunday off my existing one.

There were also no slots on any other day of the week until a Tuesday in early November, presuming, of course, that I can actually make myself free for it. So that would be a 16 month gap between services.

Even with my rudimentary, low-grade ‘O’ Level maths knowledge, I can work out that after just four years, they’ve got away with delivering only three actual fettling sessions to my precious white-box of warmth. Yes, I did have to take my socks off to calculate that – lucky my boiler is working, under the circumstances.

Whilst I’m getting hot under the collar about it, my heating could imminently cease due to a sticky doobry valve, or a blocked oojamaflip filter.

I’ve got an axe and saw on standby in the cellar, and have been eyeing up the coffee table, just in case we need to set light to something to keep warm this autumn.

Time to give them a call, I think. Their promise of an annual service appears to be just hot air.

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in The Mail, on the 15th of September, 2017. The paper re-titled it as "Boiler scheme is making me hot under the collar" on their website, and inexplicably removed a couple of lines, including the last one, which was effectively my punchline. Such is life.

I decided to ring the offending organisation today, and finally have a slot... on a Tuesday in November. Despite having the option on their website for Saturday and Sunday, they apparently don't book people in for boiler services during the weekend at this time of the year, as they're busy dealing with breakdowns.

Here's a thought - why didn't you contact me a month BEFORE my service was due in July, so we could have got it booked in on a convenient day for me, when you also wouldn't be busy with breakdowns? Gah...

(CD A-Z: Chris Rea's "The Blue Jukebox". Mellow.)

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog