The Room 101 thread - for things you hate or just having a bloody good moan

[Wrathbone]

This is turning into a proper debacle. I've got them to reduce the DD payments back to where they were, but they're still refusing the £100 credit refund despite my legal right to it and their failure to provide any reasonable grounds on which to deny it. They claimed (as expected) that it's so I don't fall into arrears in the event that energy prices go up over winter.

So I ran the numbers and detailed it out to them. For me to go into arrears by the end of March with the refund I've asked for and the amount I'm paying, energy prices would have to go up by 28.2% as of today. I asked them if that's something they were planning. They declined to confirm or deny, which is somewhat concerning! Maybe they've got their eye on Greenland...

Anyway, I've threatened them with the Energy Ombudsman, so I'm sure they're shaking in their little energy boots.

Spoiler

Oh, and I have a Complaint Handler now, which is nice. I wonder if they'll listen to any other complaints I have about things. I could refer them to the entirety of this thread.

[Raid]

For me to go into arrears by the end of March with the refund I've asked for and the amount I'm paying, energy prices would have to go up by 28.2% as of today. I asked them if that's something they were planning. They declined to confirm or deny, which is somewhat concerning! Maybe they've got their eye on Greenland...

Nah, give them some credit (though obviously you already have, hur hur), they haven't even started on Venezuela yet.

[Snowy]

This is turning into a proper debacle. I've got them to reduce the DD payments back to where they were, but they're still refusing the £100 credit refund despite my legal right to it and their failure to provide any reasonable grounds on which to deny it. They claimed (as expected) that it's so I don't fall into arrears in the event that energy prices go up over winter.

So I ran the numbers and detailed it out to them. For me to go into arrears by the end of March with the refund I've asked for and the amount I'm paying, energy prices would have to go up by 28.2% as of today. I asked them if that's something they were planning. They declined to confirm or deny, which is somewhat concerning! Maybe they've got their eye on Greenland...

Anyway, I've threatened them with the Energy Ombudsman, so I'm sure they're shaking in their little energy boots.

Spoiler

Oh, and I have a Complaint Handler now, which is nice. I wonder if they'll listen to any other complaints I have about things. I could refer them to the entirety of this thread.

It's almost as if they have realised that if every customer has a couple hundred quid in their safekeeping, they have a zero-outlay investment slush fund to boost profit.

Oh. Wait...

[Wrathbone]

Quite. I did throw the "I am not a bank" line at them, but it's obvious that energy companies are aggressively abusing the system to force customers into building up unnecessary credit.

[Lenny Solidus]

Being introduced to someone irl who actually seems interesting at first but then spoils it all by them adding 'fucking' after every other word.

Not trying to come over as pompous but it's a real conversation killer for me, the nails on a chalkboard kind.

[Wrathbone]

OVO caved eventually and are sending me the refund.

I’d go to a different provider if I thought there was any chance it’d be better there.

[Mantis]

Seriously, give Octopus a go. They're a step above the others for me just on the grounds that when you ring their customer services you can get put through to a human pretty much immediately.

[Alan]

My electricity is about 180 a month, I just leave the DD at 230 then come Christmas I do a refund and Christmas is way less painful because you kind of forget about it and boom, "free" £600 quid! :p. This year I miscalculated and my refund put me £12 in debt to which their automated system calculated my monthly DD should now be £432.23. Thankfully a quick email and they sorted it it. Octpus are pretty decent in all my contacts with them to be fair.

Oh and hey, if you decide to switch to Octopus hit one of us up for a referal and both get £50

[Wrathbone]

Cheers, I’ll have a look at Octopus.

EDIT - Just got a call to say they're sending the refund by bloody cheque. Absolute troll move.

How the hell do you even cash a cheque these days? I've not had to do one in 20+ years.

[Rusty]

If you have a banking app you can submit it through that. You take a photo of the front and back

[Raid]

I think most banks should give you the option of paying cheques in by photographing them using their mobile app - HSBC certainly were when I worked there several years back. Hopefully the software has improved since then, but as a general rule:

- Make sure there's plenty of light on the cheque.
- Make sure it's flat.
- Try to put it on a different coloured surface to help the software to understand where the cheque boundary is.
- Make sure you're putting the guide box over the whole cheque.
- Make sure it hasn't first been eaten by a dog and then regurgitated.
- Make sure it hasn't been used as nesting material for a flight of migratory birds, as this will often mean it'll be out of date.
- Try to ensure it is actually a cheque, and not an IOU from your Great Aunt for eleven cans of Spam.

I'm not saying I have PTSD, but I am having to blink a lot to make sure I'm not showing a thousand yard stare.

[Wrathbone]

Excellent, thanks. Literally no reason why they couldn't have just done a bank transfer though.

[Snowy]

Car trouble. Those who know me know I am a total petrolhead and my car wants for nothing. To have it start to misfire on the motorway this morning, causing a hurried move onto the hard shoulder, was therefore frankly rude, the ungrateful little bastard!

Four and a half extremely cold hours waiting for a recovery truck followed, the car has now been dropped off to BMW to await a no doubt eye-wateringly expensive repair, which they can't do till next Tuesday. Next stop Enterprise to get a hire car for the next 2 weeks at £450 and a £200 deposit.

What a fucking start to the week!

[Mantis]

Banning things. Always strikes me as the absolute laziest and most reductive way to try and solve a problem which more often than not doesn't fix anything anyway and only leads to more problems being created.

This whole furore among the political classes about children's access to the internet that seems to be taking more of a hold across a lot of western governments at the moment is really quite worrying because Labour are now talking about being in favour of an Australia-style social media ban for all under 16 year olds. I'm not insane, so naturally I am fully supportive of trying to reduce children's access to harmful content online, and I also think social media is one of the worst things about modern life in how it is being utilised by tech-oligarchs to manipulate masses of people whilst simultaneously rotting people's brains with cheap dopamine hits. But any realistic way of banning it is almost certainly going to connect with the UK Online Safety Act, which inevitably will mean we need to provide our IDs to social media platforms to continue using them. I've already lost access to totally innocent sub-reddits like /r beer and /r whisky because I refuse to upload my ID to Reddit. I won't be giving Meta a copy either if that's where things go. I know people argue in defense of it and say that the companies already know everything about us anyway because of all the data they harvest from us, but it is another matter entirely to start allowing them to maintain databases with copies of legal identification.

I was brought up on the idea that you should avoid putting personal identifiers online as much as possible because it makes you vulnerable. Giving random third party companies copies of ID is the absolute stupidest idea imaginable to me, already proven to be dangerous given how many leaks and hacks have been in the media the last couple of months. ID fraud and financial fraud will go through the roof the more sites implement these systems.

It is the ultimate modern Liberal wet dream coming to fruition. The citizen needs to be protected from everything and themselves so we must control and monitor every aspect of their life. It is scary because they are implementing systems which give more control over people which inevitably a government with far more sinister intentions is likely to get in and abuse. You would never have expected it, but just look at the US right now, they are literally rounding up people and shipping them off to internment camps and even executing totally innocent civilians in the streets. Imagine what could happen if some random nutjob government employee with a different ideology to you reviewed your entire online presence and decided that you didn't quite fit the mold of the world he wanted to live in. It feels like our freedoms and rights are on a very slippery slope and things are starting to build up pace quite a lot now.

And you know what? You could get children off social media by just educating parents and getting them to actually do their fucking jobs as parents. If your kid needs a phone it isn't hard to create child accounts for things, set up screen time limits, put passwords on accessing certain settings. Kids wouldn't be depressed and addicted to the internet if the parents of the UK hadn't abdicated their collective responsibility towards bringing up their own children.

It all just makes me want to go live in a forest somewhere in a cottage with no electricity.

Rant over.

[Raid]

Back when Reddit first introduced their age gating for complying with the UK's idiotic law, I decided to pit two tech companies against one another, and got Chat GPT to create an image of a man holding up his driving license, which I submitted. It took a couple of attempts as ChatGPT refused to create an image of a genuine-looking ID card, for obvious reasons, but the software Reddit used did accept it eventually (even though it really wasn't that close to a genuine article). I didn't feel particularly bad at using AI to replace the job of a hard working scam artist, and it solved the issue. No idea if it'd still work, but it's an example of just how ill thought-out and badly implemented the legislation was.