How hard can it be?

Seriously, how hard can it be to connect a house up to gas, monitor it and send a bill? You would think it was easy, but unfortunately for our gas company, it is asking way way too much.  We moved into our house almost 5 months ago and for the last 2 months I have been chasing them for MY bill.  You can already see something is wrong here - right? LOL. They found my electricity account on their system but sent the bill to an address I had with them 5 years ago - I didn’t even give them that address - they just took it off an old account - idiots!!.  Anyway, that took them 6 weeks to re-address it to our address here. I have been rolling my eyes about that ever since and am getting incredibly dizzy!

Well, after sorting the electricity part of it out, I asked them about my gas account?  What gas account? The one I organised with the electricity.  No, no, we have no account for you for gas - you must have asked some other company. OMG, you can imagine how frustrated I was with this person!  It is a brand new house, just built - no-one has been here before, there wasn’t even a gas meter here until the day we moved in - I asked for gas & electricity from the same company to be turned on.  It has been turned on - can I please have a bill?  Nope - no account.  I ended up ringing them back about 5 times over the last 2 months and was making progress with it. So much so that I received an email from them on 10 June saying it had all been sorted out, my account was being updated as they type blah blah and I should get an account shortly - thank you for my patience in this matter.

Great!!! Or so I thought …………………

Last night, I was at home organising the kids dinner (as I was off to Pilates at 5.45pm for the 6pm class).  They were having oven fish & chips with some pasta & cheese sauce - yeah I know, not very healthy but it was their weekly “your choice” dinner.  The fish & chips were almost cooked and  I poured everything into the  pot, whacked it on the stove and would you believe it - no friggin gas! WTF! I quickly put it all in a microwave jug and zapped it for them in there and spent the next 40 minutes on the phone (missing Pilates altogether - not happy Jan).  By the end of the phone call I had calmed down (just a tad mind you) - they will organise for an urgent connection in the morning and apologised no where near enough to my liking though.  I dragged my feet to the kitchen put the pot of vegetables, that were sitting on the stove, in the fridge, took out the carton of eggs and had microwaved scrambled eggs (which was yummy but not what I had planned on eating).  We froze last night, we froze this morning and we smell bad.

The gas has been put back on (about half an hour ago now) - I am now waiting for the hot water service to heat up so I can have a shower.

The only good thing that has come out of this is that we will not be billed for the gas we have used so far.  They have completely cancelled the other account (you know, the one they didn’t have) and have opened a new one to start billing from 19 June