Modern life – who needs it?
It will not surprise regular readers of The Rust that one issue our editorial team seeks to avoid is waxing too often – or too lyrical – about the complications of modern life and/or simultaneously bemoaning “How much more ordered, settled, logical and just generally better” Life used to be back in our days of yore.
In which context, nevertheless, I’m afraid my post today comes with a “curmudgeonly git alert” warning …
For reasons which often escape me, these days I seem to spend an inordinately large amount of my time dealing with “officialdom” generally, most often utility suppliers of one sort or another. For all I know other people – especially those under the age of thirty – may find such experiences rewarding and straightforward. However, as an oldie, I find them invariably frustrating to the point of exasperation.
In the good old, bad old days, you could speak to your bank manager, or your gas and electricity suppliers, or your local garage owner and achieve “stuff” comparatively easily.
However.
In the heady 21st Century smartphones, websites, automated phone answering systems in which apparently “any old how – and preferably as complicated as possible – will do”, for those of us schooled in the ways of typewriters and letters the whole process of dealing with suppliers etc. remains increasingly fraught.
In 2023 you can ring the customer phone line of any utility supplier you’d like and – after going through a sequence in which you have to identify yourself and then supply your customer number and/or reference, they pass you straight into a labyrinth of an automated system giving anything from 3 to 7 numbered options that you can now choose from in order to advance your cause.
Far too often in my experience, when these options are presented, none of them ever apply to the situation I am in, or indeed the issue that I wish to discuss. As a result, I have to “hang on” in order to speak to the next available operator, albeit that “our lines are very busy at the moment and therefore [as an alternative] you might prefer to go to our website where you can ‘obtain the answers to practically any query you might have’ …”
There are two problems with this suggestion for any sane adult.
Firstly, you are acutely conscious of the fact that – if only you could speak to a real person (as opposed to a robot) – you could achieve all you want/need in a maximum of three minutes.
Secondly, from your own historic achingly-tedious previous experiences, you already know that “online chatting with a robot” is – by a considerable margin – probably the ultimate frustration of all-time to any human being with a functioning brain.
Well, actually (now I think of it) maybe make that the SECOND worst ultimate experience of all, just behind that of hanging on the phone for 45 minutes minimum – sensing the remainder of your all-too-short future life ticking away, second by second, whilst being forced to listen to piped muzak as you do – before anyone comes on the line to speak to you.
As yet another classic example in a long line of them, I recently had the following experience with an energy supplier.
Minding own my business several weeks ago now – out of the blue – I received a text on my smartphone from an organisation requesting me to ring their specified number urgently, quoting a case number which they then supplied.
Having no previous contact from, or knowledge of, the organisation concerned, I rang the number. It turned out that – in effect – they were a debt collection outfit working with/for the energy supplier concerned in supposed pursuit of an unpaid bill of mine in a sum closer to £1,000 than £500.
This development puzzled me somewhat for two reasons. Firstly, by mutual agreement, three months previously I had negotiated a “parting of the ways” (the date of which they themselves decided) with the energy company, had then paid off an outstanding amount due to them and switched to a different supplier.
Secondly, so far as I was aware, since parting company with them, I had received no communication (invoice, statement, chasing email/letter) regarding any outstanding amount due to them.
When I pointed all this out in my phone conversation with the lady from the debt collection agency, she said she recognised there might be a misunderstanding and – as a first step – she’d arrange for the energy company to send me a copy of the invoice they’d issued for the amount that she was now seeking me to stump up.
Dear reader, following that phone conversation I received no further communication – still less the promised copy invoice – from either the energy company or the debt collection agency for a fortnight.
At least, that is, until earlier this week. When the energy company concerned sent me a letter delivered by post containing a statement confirming that my “account” with them stood in credit (not by very much, granted – a few pounds sterling – but in credit nonetheless).
To recap, therefore.
Out of the blue I was recently contacted by a debt collection agency chasing a payment of nearly £1,000 that I allegedly owed to an energy company. I didn’t owe them anything. They couldn’t produce a copy of any invoice they’d sent me – or indeed any chasing statement/letter they’d sent me. There was a simple reason for this – none existed.
By now – in normal times of the British Empire – I would have at least expected some communication from somebody explaining what had gone on – and with it an apology. But these days, of course, standards of “proper” behaviour in all walks of life – and at all levels of business/public organisations – have slipped beyond all recognition.
I remain waiting – but not in hope.
