Missed a weekend rant last week having been rather pre-occupied for a while. Digi-birder and I both work for the same environmental consultancy. We got made redundant this week. It has been on the cards for a while and I’ve had a month of getting to work on Monday mornings and finding myself being angry within 5 minutes. Angry at some of the attitude displayed by those upstairs and angry at other muddle-headedness, so it was a pleasant surprise to arrive last Monday almost in a state of serenity. Nothing made me angry, it was as if I knew the curtain would fall later in the week, the uncertainty was gone and I was ready for it. Though we will be in a bit of a pickle as a result, with a redundancy payment and a plan of cutbacks we should be able to survive the loss of our jobs for a while and in the interim be able to support a couple of the hotshots who look like they will be able to persuade the people who were very likely to have given us follow-up work but took too long about it, that they should give it to the same teams that produced such sterling studies for them only a few weeks earlier. The clients seem to be amenable and I think it will work so that by February we’ll be working again on something.
So I’ve been feeling pre-occupied and too down to be grumpy about much, so it’s words again. The first is the use of ‘Ramp up’ for increase. Isn’t that ridiculous? Ramps go up and down and are things that facilitate access. Got sod all to do with increasing intensity or rising prices (unless you’ve just had a ramp installed and it’s proved to be a lot more expensive than it would have cost you two years ago). And price hikes for goodness’ sake? Well, I know my money often takes a walk before I get it under control but what’s a walk in the country got to do with prices – and a hike’s another one of those things that goes down as well as up, so what’s the point?
But here’s the peach this week. I have been in correspondence with nPower about a wrong initial meter reading and the consequent wrong payment, wrong annual consumption estimate for next year and wrong adjustment to my monthly direct debit. I had to email the final British gas bill and my own meter initial reading to them and they went away and somehow persuaded British Gas that it was their fault and BG should give me the refund because, though BG took a reading on the same day I had, they told nPower the wrong figure. I’ve had a fat cheque from BG but I still had to argue with nPower that all their subsequent projections are false. They have finally accepted my arguments to a point. What I discovered, though, is that nPower levy their ‘premium rate’ at different percentages of consumption in different months of the year, so in the summer months it’s only the first 1% of your consumption that is charged at the higher rate, but in winter it’s 18%, so gas is much more expensive at times of greatest demand. This has a certain logic, but if they are always able to meet the demand, the price should be the same, shouldn’t it? But that’s not my grump. Would you believe what they call this?
The gas is ‘sculpted’ so that the summer months are 1% and the winter 18%. Sculpted? SCULPTED? If I wasn’t certain that it was yet another example of some corporate craphound thinking he was being supercool by allocating a new name to try to disguise a simple bit of weighted pricing, I’d think they were magicians, no, alchemists, able to sculpt non-solids. I’d like to see them sculpt their own flatulence (and I’m going to switch anyway, they are still proposing to take too great a monthly sum).
July 21, 2011 at 12:01 pm |
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