Echoes of Flavio's Ghost Dreaming

Spent a good chunk of the afternoon yesterday on the phone to First Utility, who for the last three years supply me with electricity, gas and inflated estimate bills that they send to me in duplicate as they have me with two different customer account numbers. To try and make that simpler, they have issued a third account number and decided that I have never paid electricity or gas and I therefore owe them 2.393 pounds and pence. I'm getting final notices of payment on that last, third account number, mentioning legal department, etc. Yesterday I phoned them for the third time -the two previous calls had fallen through exactly twenty minutes into them, after being put on hold while the person at the other end 'was sorting things out'. This is on an 0845 number. Every time you speak to someone different so you have to go over the same story again. They have 'smart' meters that don't work and I have been sending them emails with the readings (including photographs of the meters..). Long history of email and phone correspondence which goes from the surreal to the Kafkian.

Haven't moved away as there is that ghost second (third?!) account that would still be hanging over my head, as is happening to a neighbour in the building right now (First Utility was already set up as the provider in this new build). I'm also finding that they have the very worst reviews of all gas/electricity providers..

I put a small personal recommendation on Twitter ('never ever consider using these people as gas/leccy providers') and they came back to me asking whether they could help. Can they?

Sorry about the lengthy post!

Right, so the man from First Utility came to change the leccy meter, because this was going to sort out the gas meter readings' problem.. I think that's how it goes. I'm beginning to lose track of this mess.. ok, guy turns up at the same time as a pupil does for his lesson. Guy from FU looks at the meter and says "but this has already been changed". And then goes to the gas meter and finds that the 3G device that should have been installed on it to send automatic readings to FU has, too, already been installed by them. As I'd told them they'd done, nearly a year ago. A long year where I have been billed twice (two different user accounts for the same billing), with estimates according to which I was using four times as much gas in this tiny studio flat as I was in the previous, four-bedroom flat with four people living in it. So he's trying to sort this thing out with his office on the phone but his own people seem to give him the run-around as much as they have done me. In the meantime, I have a pupil sitting there paying for this time and the phone never stops ringing, including some confused lady who would just not believe this was not the pharmacy...

There are days like this, sometimes. Hopefully very seldom.

It looks nigh on impossible that I'll be getting the mortgage to buy the flat, even though I have a 48% deposit and the amounts required are tiny. There is one more thing to try but I'm not holding hope. At least this time I got an explanation on what is happening. Back to plan B. Or C.

Pronoia: “the delusion that others think well of one, the unreasoning belief that your superiors think you are indispensable, that your colleagues adore you, and that you are doing brilliantly in your work"
a word coined by Fred Goldner, in an article in Social Problems (1982) -nicked from a music theory site.

... Earthquake in Italy, in a region where some of the Italian side of my family live. Have spoken to them and they are all well, although they had been worried for a young cousin who is a student in L’Aquila -where the Uni students’ residence hall collapsed, if I understood ok. She’s ok, though.

This day is bringing never-ending joy...

Apart from global warming, nuclear war, bioterrorism, grey goo, the asteroid and Gordon Brown,, one more thing to worry about, another doomsday scenario to come from the skies... killer plasma flares from the Sun..

.. that, like every year with the first cold snap, the boiler broketh down...

Since yesterday my iphone is, most of the time, getting no signal from O2. Not sure whether something has gone wrong with phone or with O2, will try to find out later. This does mean that I may miss your call/text. If you need to get through to me it might be safer to email.

If we pray really hard, we’ll keep the heathens out of the White House....

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7687286.stm

This item on the BBC science pages sent me on a sort of wistful mood,f or some reason. Maybe because as a musician, making music often feels like something very important and transcendent, something that goes to the essence of what the world is and of ourselves, whilst in living our lives in a human society we often feel (or I do, at any rate) that what we do is unimportant and irrelevant and that that is one reason why so many of us struggle so much in the ‘real’ world...