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.)

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