Scottish Power – positively Kafkaesque

I sent this to the Chief Operating Officer of Scottish Power by e-mail on Feb 18th:

Dear Mr Anderson

re Outstanding monies owed on Agreement 510292699

I switched my accounts from Scottish Power to EDF in mid November. I queried at that time how long it would take for a refund to be issued for the credit balance, and was told “4-6 weeks”. I think this is far too long, but it would have been a lot better than where I am now.

There is still an outstanding credit on my account of £370.96. I made a complaint via your web form on 5th Feb, and got an auto response saying that I would get an answer by 10th Feb. I found this unacceptable, so took to Twitter to try to get some assistance. Incidentally, as of this morning, 18th Feb, I have still had no response to this complaint e-mail.

After the third Tweet, your Customer Services department got back to me. On 5 Feb, Nicola informed me, via Twitter direct mail, that “for some reason the final bill hasn’t been produced and it won’t allow me to complete this so I am seeking advice on how to get this generated and will be back in touch as soon as I can progress this.”

I asked for an update, again via Twitter direct mail, on 10th Feb, and was told that

“I had raised a work item to get the final bill produced but this hasn’t been completed yet. I know it can take a while for the work item to be picked up”.

I asked how long was “a while”, but no response, and I have heard no more.

My account with yourselves is marked as closed. I have no idea why no final invoice has been produced, but I am tired of waiting for my money. I therefore enclose an invoice for the full sum, and would advise that if payment is not received, in full, within 7 days, I will have no hesitation in taking this matter further. Please also note that I reserve the right to charge interest on late payment.

Nothing. Not even an autoresponder. Utter silence.

Started Tweeting again on Monday 25th, and many people are in the same boat. Still no response. I also found a Complaints e-mail address by Googling, copied the lot to them, and said I’d be taking them to Small Claims next week. No response, not even an automatic one.

Yesterday, I received a response to my *original* e-mail, the one on 5th Feb, which merely stated:

We are still in process of finalising the account and once it will be done we will issue the refund.

I apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused to you.

In somewhat of a rage, I replied that they might like to escalate this to a superior, as I would taking it to the Small Claims Court next week. And got a reply,

Thank you for sending your email to the ScottishPower Online Energy customer service centre. A copy of what you have sent to us is included at the bottom of this email.

We will respond to your enquiry within 5 working days.

Please be aware that this message is generated from an unmanned mailbox. We cannot respond to any mail to this address.

Thanks and regards,

Online Energy Customer Service Team, ScottishPower

and how are you spending *your* Christmas Eve?

when I arrived in the study this morning, things weren’t entirely as they should be.

existing connections were ok – IRC, terminal windows, Adium. But Firefox wouldn’t connect to anything and, in my bleary state, I thought Squid was playing up. Went to check a couple of other things, and nothing …

then I realised that no DNS meant a problem with the Windows server. And indeed, when I went into the server room littlest bedroom, it was sitting there with a blue screen on its face. Aaargh.

it won’t boot in safe mode with networking. It won’t boot in safe mode at all. It claims to have an error in its NTFS file system, according to the BSOD. Oh joy. No, there’s no recovery console installed. No, it won’t repair off the CD.

so we will have to go to PCWhirled and pay their extortionate price for a new hard drive, and reinstall the server. I don’t know how many hard drives we’ve bought this year, always with an extra one to keep in stock, but we have gone through the sodding things like a knife through butter recently.

we have backups of all the data, but we don’t bother to back up the OS, so that’ll be a fun day in the workhouse. The backups are on external drives, but they’re all accessed via SMB, so I can’t get to them either.

in the middle of all this, one of the server UPSen started beeping – had blown the fuse in its plug.

good will to all men and peace on earth. But bah bloody humbug to computers.