Loving our water board
Got to love the efficiency of our water board in trying to replace our meters; I love them so much I had to send them an email telling them this.
Dear [Name withheld]
Thank you for your letter dated 7/1/08 (received 11/1/08) regarding your request for an appointment letter dated 2/1/08 (received 7/1/08). I am surprised that you have been unable to contact us by telephone as we have been available during normal working hours (9am-5.30pm) and for those odd times no-one has been in the office we have a perfectly functional answering machine; on which no messages have been left.
We have however seen one of your engineers working at the site our water meter is located (which along with all the units in this section are not located in the premises, but in the road) and indeed he managed to contact us on his mobile, albeit unintentionally, to mutter something about our meter having been replaced.
On our end of the contacting business we have been attempting without success to contact either of the two numbers listed with only an engaged tone to greet us, and thus resorted to email, which incidentally you don't include on your letter dated 7/1/08.
As to the rest of your letter what charges would you be talking about? How could you attempt to "reinstate" normal recovery action when as far as we are concerned no recovery action (normal or otherwise) has ever been instated against an account we know nothing about.
To reiterate the main points:
1) Sending a 'complaining' letter 5 days after the original, when it can take 2 days to be received and another 2 of those days occur on a weekend, is not a good idea;
2) The 'complaining' letter should, at the least, duplicate all the contact information contained in the original letter;
3) Provide contact numbers that aren't permanently engaged;
4) The water meter is not on the premises as has been pointed out to every engineer that comes to check/read the meter; so no appointment to access the premises is required;
5) Please don't attempt to threaten someone about collecting "outstanding charges" on an account they may know nothing about for something they haven't asked for; and finally
6) Locate a dictionary and look up the meaning of "reinstate"
Yours sincerely
[Name withheld]
4 comments:
You make Ann Robinson seem like a quite cuddle little old lady… I like it! :-D
Oddly we've had no response :-).
Now I'm having (continuing) fun with an electricity supplier -
"Hi we're the landlords of this property and we've had a new tenant move in"
"So when did you move out?"
sigh
Oh and they've only known this for six+ months, they already have every single piece of information from both parties involved for six+ months. Every time I've contacted them with a "please stop sending us bills for this occupied property" I've been told the department handling it is "in the process of changing it over" and now it appears as if we're all starting from scratch again.
For those who remember this is the company that kept trying to charge us £200+/month for ~zero electricity use.
Question: Isn't trying to charge somebody for something they don't owe you… ya know… illegal?
Not if you're an electricity supplier. See not only can you get a standing charge, but you also can get an administrative charge.
So the property may be empty and no (or negligible) electricity actually used, but they can still charge you (according to the very law) whatever they bloody like in charges. Think of it as the same as telephone line rental for the equipment.
Oh and before some smart-alec asks why we didn't switch supplies I've already gone into far greater depth on this elsewhere.
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