What a frustrating day - you would think wouldn't you, that if a couple move to a new-build home, that they would start getting bills for gas, electricity and water, without having to tell the companies supplying it to start charging us? What madness!
Since moving in, on October 31st, we have had no utilities bills, and it's now 2 and a half months since we came here! It's ridiculous!
Lying in bed this morning at around 7 am, I suddenly realise this fact, with a start! My goodness, I can't let this go on or we might be faced with massive demands for money at some point in the future. It's madness !!!! [You've established that already! - Ed]
So today turns out to be a frustrating day, because I have to ring the Severn Trent water company helpline and then the British Gas hotline.
Severn Trent have apparently "not set up the new account yet", which is extremely poor - they were our suppliers in Cheltenham so we just moved to a new address in their area and we're not new customers. So what's so difficult about that?
British Gas, who supply both our gas and our electricity, turn out to be unaware that our smart meter for gas isn't functioning - it isn't sending them any information about our usage of gas, which is crazy! And it turns out that we haven't received any bills yet for electricity, because we haven't yet used up the Governments £200 handout to customers, to help them with the much bigger bills that everybody is getting now.
This proves to be all a bit tortuous to unravel. The woman on the helpdesk is charming, however, and I tell her eventually she's the nicest person I've ever talked to on a helpdesk.
She asks me if it's cold where I live, and comments that it's very warm where she is. She tells me that she's speaking to me from South Africa, so that figures - it's summer there, just like it is with our daughter Sarah in Perth, Australia. I had already "clocked" the woman's South African accent, but hadn't thought anything of it because there are hundreds of thousands of South Africans living in the UK.
She says she makes a habit of talking to her customers like she would if she were talking to somebody in her family.
Why can't they all do that?!!!!!
She's so nice that I forgive her for twice making me go downstairs, out into the cold, to get down on the cold hard ground to try and look inside the battered brown gas meter box - it's madness !!!!
11:00 There's excitement in the air this morning as Lois and I look out onto our new-build street, when we realise that Persimmon, the builders, are planting some trees across on the other side from us. That's going to make the street a lot more attractive, no doubt about that!
Lois thinks the trees may be silver birches because some of the thin, weedy-looking trunks look a little bit white, or pale at least. The trees planted obviously need to be thin trees, though, otherwise they would crowd out the cars parked in front of people's houses, which wouldn't be good, to put it mildly!
12:00 We go for a walk round and about the local Three Horseshoes pub and take a look at the nearby church, St Andrews, where some of the local U3A groups hold meetings. I myself have joined the local U3A, and Lois is planning to do so when she gets a moment - life is such a mad whirl here, there's hardly time to breathe haha!
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