This morning's clowns are at Scottish Power, famous collectors of money and occasional suppliers of electricity. I received a text message on my phone - time to submit a new meter reading, it said. Good enough - I went to the desktop computer, entered the supplied URL and submitted a new reading.
While I was in there, I was reminded that my sign-in for my account there includes an email address which I no longer have. Ah - good opportunity to get that fixed, thinks I.
Went into my account details - I can edit just about anything, but no mention of email address. Oh well - there is a chat service on the internet site, so I asked about how to change my email address. The bot was able to answer that one, and it referred me to the screen of account information I'd just been looking at - the one that doesn't mention email addresses.
I must have been feeling energetic this morning; the original text message also recommended that I download and install their [award winning] phone app. So I did - that might be more up to date.
Excellent. It loaded, and opened up, and I was invited to log in. So I entered my old email address and my password, which is still correct.
That's right - you guessed. Since this was the first attempted log-in from my phone, I was told that they would have to check it was really me, so they had sent me a confirmatory email to my email address. The one I no longer have.
By this point my enthusiasm had dimmed. There is a phone number I can call, the website informs me. I have to say that I have phoned Scottish Power before - I have, in fact, spent many, many hours listening to music on that number, hoping that a person might eventually speak to me. Such a phone call will be necessary to sort out my problem, I guess, but it may be a while before I again feel happy and strong enough to try it. This is not the sort of thing I need during Caffeine Detox month.
Does anybody actually design these systems, or do they just grow out of the wall, underneath the sink?
Appropriate song: Judy Collins, Send in the Clowns.
ReplyDeleteGreat song, man.
DeleteI could give you a run for your money with my ongoing journey with BT. Despite making the arrangements about a month before we moved, here we are a month since the move still getting weekly updates which can't yet give us even a provisional date for when we will get our phone line and broadband.
ReplyDeleteRob, since we have now officially joined the 3rd World, we need to adopt appropriate tactics. Have you bribed anyone yet? This could be the problem.
DeleteI gather Scottish Power make a bit of a habit of incompetence; there's a story in today's Guardian in the consumer section about their appallingly bad treatment of the son of a dead customer who was trying to get hold of a refund for his father's account. Without the Guardian getting involved the mess would probably still not have been sorted...
ReplyDeleteI guess they are about the same as most energy suppliers (choose your own attribute) - they have some additional challenges in that the area they supply is mostly Class 2 Terrain, and their infrastructure has been skimpily maintained since about 1960. One of the saddest tales around here was in the immediate aftermath of Storm Arwen, 18 months ago, when, for regulatory reasons, they shut off the power to the village of Abbey St Bathans, in Berwickshire, although there was an old guy dying, alone, in his cottage at the time. Business decisions...
DeleteWhatever else, it would not be their fault.
Now that made me chuckle. I've been in the same situation with another one of the countries finest companies. Also I've told them I don't know how many times they keep spelling my name wrong and every letter or email they still spell it Rray? Sigh....
ReplyDeleteHi Rray - I think they are working on the principle that eventually you get so fed up that you change your real name by Deed Poll, which will save them the effort.
DeleteRray - you've also reminded me of a fine exchange I had with the Royal Bank of Scotland (people all over the country now cross themselves when they hear the dread name).
DeleteThis was years ago - they kept mailing me at the wrong address, for about a year after I'd moved house and told them about it. I wrote to them, yet again, and I got a letter back from them, apologising and confirming that they had now corrected my address, but they sent the letter to the old one!
I'm sure that, if they still exist, they are much better now... well, maybe...