Oh, what the heck

06/06/05

You could be anyone by day, when the only thing that could give you away is the occasional band shirt and all the EBM in your cd collection. You probably have a day job, have alot of other interests besides goth, or are just too lazy to dress up for anything besides a club night. I bet you love 80's music.

What kind of goth are you?
Created by ptocheia

The idiots that are British Gas

05/10/04

Oh boy have I had enough of this company. Since I began my dealings with these retards I must have made over 100 phone calls to them. Quite frankly their management appear to be total incompetants who hide behind ever-suffering call-centre staff who don't deserve the abuse the cowards in the upper ranks so richly deserve. Once it took the better part of a year to get our gas bill sorted out, now I've got that under control it's the electricity that's becoming annoying.

British Gas doesn't send out meter readers (it costs too much) though they do at least once a year (which is the bare minimum effort required by law). Normally they send you an *estimated* reading - in other words A GUESS based on past usage trends. Usually the estimate is pretty inaccurate, but hey, they get to charge like wounded bulls and keep the cash for up to a year until the meter is actually read. Of course, if the estimates have been too low, you get whacked with a whopping great bill that could give an elephant a heart-attack.

As a "customer service" you can read the meter yourself and submit the value via the web (in other words, "Do our job for us, cos we're too cheap to do it ourselves.")
Here's what their House.co.uk website website said last night when I gave it a meter reading after recieving a guestimate in the post:

"The meter reading entered does not seem correct in light of previous meter readings. Please check the reading entered and re-submit."

"The meter reading you have entered requires further investigation. Please enter your meter serial number and press Confirm."

Except, as most UK companies still live in the 50's, they assume someone (that good little demure barefoot pregnant wife maybe?) is at home baking scones for her man to come home from the factory at 5pm just waiting for a meter reader to call.
Uh, no. They expect you to be at home, during business hours to let the git in to read the meter because the British seem incapable of building houses (to this day!) with meters on the outside, thus requiring you to let total strangers into your house during the day while (usually) alone. Clever.

Hey! Dickheads! People actually WORK for a living ALL DAY you know! Well, actually, I suppose you wouldn't know, you're probably too busy playing golf.

I figure the system got all pissy because I submitted a reading 600 units lower than their best guess. Oh gee, sorry you didn't like it, but that's the frickin reading! Perhaps it was lower because oh, I don't know, half the house was empty for a few weeks while we looked for new flatmates and I've been away on holiday for a while.
Honestly, that these dolts have the gall to suggest you're lying to them over a meter reading when they can't even bill accurately because their billing system is a shambles is bloody insulting.

Here's another example of British Gas at it's finest:
My friends Dan and Jenny move into their (un-occupied) house and get the gas connected, great.

In the meantime they get bills for someone else to their address, so, being polite, sensible Kiwi's they ring the gas company and let them know. "Oh thank-you," says BG "we'll fix that".

The bills keep coming.

So they call again.

"Oh terribly sorry, that shouldn't have happened, we'll fix that right away."

...and the bills keep coming.

One day a gasman shows up to disconnect their gas because of the unpaid bills (not theirs of course, which are totally up to date.)

So they ring the gas company, Dan tears someone a new one and the bills stopped.

...until last week.

And this folks, is a good example of what is wrong in Britain today...

If you have shares in British Gas, may I politely suggest you flog 'em for whatever you can, because if this crap keeps up and people keep changing suppliers like we are, they ain't going to be around in the future. I have suggested to Dan that he sues British Gas for harassment. He likes that idea.

Waiting for the first wisecrack...

29/09/04

How to scare your flatmate:

17/06/04

1. Install VNC on the PC in the living room that plays the MP3's

2. While flatmate is intently occupied in the living room, open a VNC connection from your room, because you'd like to listen to some music.

3. Start WinAmp, forgetting that last time it was on, the volume was way up.

4. Perform CPR on flatmate.

Ouch.

10/05/04

There are mornings when I'm half awake and reach out for the person next to me in that nice warm and fuzzy moment.
Then I realise there's no-one there and the world is suddenly cold.

Dang tyop's

20/04/04

Kudos to Mrs B for pointing out the typo in yesterday's posting headline.
The should read "Good grief..." (i before e except after c and all that... ;-)

Good greif - an update!

19/04/2004

Jó napot kivánok.

Ok, I've finally gotten off my behind and scanned some recent photo's. This little feat has also spurred my desire to purchase a digital camera. You can, of course, find the results on the Photographs page.

If you've been wondering why you haven't heard from me in a while, well there's been a lot going on. I was in NZ for the entire month of February and playing with HTML was very far from my mind...
I had a ball by the way. Much thanks to everyone I caught up with and my sincerest apologies to everyone I missed. Next time! I promise!

Since getting back, things have just been nucking futs 'round here. A lot of my time has been spent in Reading working on building a new training room there. I have to finish it all by this Wednesday afternoon and working longer and longer hours to do it. (Not like I have a life outside of here anyway.) At the end of the day it's all more ££'s in the bank.

There is new equipment for here as well but it is not so urgent and I'll do it later this week. Upgrades mostly for our existing machines. Oh, I did manage to score two racks of servers & RAID array's the other day :-)

My exceedingly annoying flatmate moved out a few weeks ago (YAY!) Alas, when she left she had the cable (telephone & Internet) account closed (it was in her name). Especially infuriating after we (the remaining three of us) had asked her to transfer it to one of us. So I came home [from Reading] to find we have no 'net and no phone! Telewest have provisioned a new connection but it is not going to be ready until the 27th, so we will have had no phone or Internet for a month.

Before you ask, no, I am not coping with bandwidth withdrawl at all well...   ;-)

The TV was hers as well, so we have no TV, that's been really good. It's very quiet at the house now. Plenty of time to read my books and listen to CD's. I am doing better with learning Hungarian but sometimes it's a lot like being a child starting school and I feel a little stupid sometimes because it can be quite hard. Nothing good ever comes easily I suppose.

On a minor side note, the other server I use for my personal email was compromised so I lost access during the rebuild. It's all fixed now and working better than before. I can't complain as I *really* need to pay them for my usage anyway :D

So, that's been my lot recently. Hopefully you'll hear a bit more from me sooner rather than later.

Viszontlátásra,
Richard.

Yup, a new site design!

02/11/2003

Well it's been about a year since the last revision so I guess it was about due. :-)
This is a totally new version re-written from scratch. No more frames, the menu's changed format, nice new Cascading Style Sheet too.

This new layout is really fast to load - I designed it to be useable over my cellphone at 9.6kbps (just because, that's why.) It's also a lot easier to maintain. Let me know if it breaks your browser.
A contact email address is on the "About Me" page.