Good afternoon,
My name is Formerly Diddums, I live at flat 19, unnamed road. I am in the rather unfortunate position of having to rely on you for my water supply. You’ll see on my account that I refused a direct debit of £203.54. I’d like to know where a company such as yourselves get such big balls because I’m clearly missing out. Allow me to explain. In January this year (so almost a year ago, let’s keep that timescale fresh in our minds for the sake of this story, it’s quite spectacular) you decided to increase my monthly direct debit from £40 a month to £65 a month. That’s an increase of over 50%. How you managed to come to this conclusion without wondering if we’d suddenly started an illegal underground fish fighting ring or a car wash on our balcony really does allude to how easy it is for you to stiff your customers without even batting an eyelid. If I was on your end, alarm bells would be ringing, not least because you could’ve developed a leak, but obviously that entails being competent so we’ll leave that out of this story for your convenience.
I rang up and asked why this increase happened, the person on the phone said that our meter readings were taken and the increase reflected the new reading. Now obviously aware of our water usage profile I decided to investigate, and found that you had taken the wrong reading. At this point I was still rather calm and patient, mistakes happen, I’m not an unreasonable person, I’ll simply ring up with the correct reading and rectify the situation. Except that this wasn’t to be, you “had to send someone out to investigate”. Then all went quiet on your end. Not a letter, not a phone call, nothing (don’t be silly, we’re under the rug now aren’t we?).
June. Time to chase you up. I get a new meter reading (bear in mind we’re now six months on from your last meter reading, which according to yourselves was taken in December) and call you. Turns out that you can in fact take a meter reading over the phone, contradicting what you told me in our conversation six months prior. Again we’ll leave that out for convenience sake, let’s not confuse matters. Turns out that the meter reading that I took in June was lower than the reading you took in December (six months, I quite like this whole six months thing) and you said you’d send out an engineer to investigate and you’d freeze my direct debit until further notice as my account was obviously considerably overpaid. Fair enough, I’ll wait.
We’re now in December (another 6 months, do you guys only work for a couple of weeks every six months or something?) and I got a letter which basically went like this:
“water monies pls, £203.54 k thnx” and that was it.
I then saw that you decided to take the whole amount, with no consideration to our prior discussions, two weeks before Christmas. Thanks to you, I will be eating beans on toast and my son will be getting a cardboard cutout of the scalextric track I was going to get him. Our Christmas bubbly will be Lambrini and our choccies will be smarties put in an old Celebrations tin from last year. Well, this would be the case if I wasn’t savvy to your ability to want to ruin Christmas. Or if I had a son (I added him for dramatic effect, hope it worked).
Anyway. I’m venturing from the story now. What it boils down to is this: You messed up. You overcharged us. You fobbed us off over and over. You lied to us. Then a year later you figured things out on your end and decided to just help yourselves to our money without even wondering if we were in the position to pay it. I’ve refused because your actions are ridiculous.
Please explain to me how you’re going to fix this, because until you do, I won’t be paying a penny.
Kind regards,
Formerly Diddums
