British Gas (by alaric)
Ok, I'm starting to get annoyed with British Gas, so it's time for a RANT.
When we moved into the new home, it had prepayment meters for gas and electricity. For those not familiar, these are meters where, rather than having your meters read and being billed on what you have used, you have to take a smartcard to a shop and pay to get it "charged" with credit, which you then take home and insert into the meter. The meter keeps a credit balance, which it subtracts from as you use energy, and when it hits zero, you get switched off until you put more in.
This is annoying, as you have to keep remembering to top it up, and it's also more expensive; you get charged more per unit of energy used for the privilege of all that extra infrastructure. It's usually an arrangement one enters into if one is having trouble paying the energy bills, as it makes you unable to use more than you can afford. In which case, you can get put onto prepayment meters, at an even more inflated rate, in order to pay off the debt as well as buying your energy every time you top up.
So, we of course wanted OFF. To do this we first need to take over the gas and electricity supply from the previous folks, then when the account's in our name, we can get it transferred. The gas and electricity accounts are both run by British Gas, who helpfully send a letter to "The Homeowner" at the address telling us to get in touch with them as soon as possible so we can take over the account, as the previous folks had told them they'd moved out; in particular, it warned us that the previous owner's smartcards may be configured to repay debts, so we'd need our own ones to be charged a more reasonable rate.
So we sign up with them, as advised, and are told it'll take about twenty-eight days for "the paperwork" to happen, and then we'll get our new gas and electricity smartcards shortly after that.
So we plod on, using the previous owner's smartcards which, I note, are particularly expensive for gas at least; we're putting in £20 top-ups of gas at least once a week, and often twice.
Then we get a letter asking us to ring them to confirm some details, which I do, and am thanked for the details, and told the account take-over can now REALLY start, and will probably be finished around the end of February, and we should be able to get our meters swapped over to normal ones after that.
Well, it's now March, and I've rung up to ask about that, only to find out that only the electricity is in our name; the gas is still in the previous people's name. Apparently "an error" was made originally. Anyway, apparently that's being cleared up, and they're trying to get me set up for a credit meter, and I was on hold for ages, and got cut off, so rang up again, and was on hold for ages, then was told it was taking a while so they'd ring me back...
That was a few hours ago. I'm still waiting. And we're still running on the previous owner's smartcards, paying inflated rates. It'll have been two months soon.
WHY does this have to be so SLOW? Why can't they just put the account into our name immediately, when we ring up? Why does it need to take 28 days at all, let alone take the month and a half it's been so far?
While we've been waiting for the gas and electricity to be fully transferred, British Telecom have managed to lay an entire NEW PHONE LINE to our house, complete with digging trenches and everything, and Andrews and Arnold (AAISP) set up broadband on it. Both actions requiring ACTUAL WORK to happen rather than just changing some entries in a database and posting us some smartcards. AAISP's contribution to this alone is probably similar to what British Gas had to do; adding us to their accounts database and contracting BT to put an ADSL linecard in at the exchange, then posting us a configured router, and it took them one week, most of which was waiting for BT to do their bit...
Building Maintenance | alaric | 
Fri 2nd Mar 2012 3:37 pm
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