I had a run in with my energy company, Scottish Power, this week. They provide both gas and electricity and the bill they sent out for the winter quarter was a touch high, despite it being based on an actual meter reading, rather than an estimate. At £200, the gas portion was relatively reasonable, considering that it’s been freezing for five months and the heating’s been on seemingly permanently for this period. And even though I can never be bothered to turn off electrical appliances at the plug when I’m not using them, I’m not that bad at turning off lights and not using power excessively, so when the electricity bill was £550, I was a little puzzled to say the least. A check of the meter reading and a phone call to the company rectified the problem – they’d fucked up and the electricity bill was actually only £150 for the quarter.

But how to stop a payment of £850 going out of my account?

“Oh, just cancel the direct debit, and when you get the new bill, set up another one, it’ll be fine.”

Fair enough, so the direct debit was cancelled and I waited for the correct bill to arrive.

On Tuesday, I got another correspondence from Scottish Power:

“Since you’ve cancelled your direct debit, you now have to go on a monthly payment plan and pay your bill for £850 over the next three months, starting with an instalment of £220 on 14th February, please set up a direct debit.”

Fucking numpties.

So I had to phone them up and this meant that I had to get embroiled in their automated answering system, with instructions being given to me in Scottish.

“Och nock nook, accoont numberrrrrr”

“Och nock aye the noo, date of birrrrth”

I could just about make out the important requests for input, but their system relies on voice recognition that doesn’t understand an accent unless it sounds like it’s from Take the High Road, so I ended up shouting at it, very slowly, the way you have to do when you’re trying to be understood by foreigners.

Eventually, I got through that bit and was put on hold because “All oor ooperatorrrrs are extrrreeemly buzzy at the mooment, yoor call is verrry impoortant te us” whatever the fuck that meant.

And then the “on hold” music started. For fuck’s sake. I can’t remember whether it was Vivaldi or Beethoven, but it was shite. I was in hell. There was the obligatory 20 seconds of music, which faded out momentarily while some Scottish words interrupted it; I don’t know what they were saying, some sort of recipe for root vegetables cooked in sick or something, then back to the music.

After a while, I got through the Tracy, who had had special training in speaking in English as part of a five day residential course on Summerisle. It’s the course where they learn to speak to English people on days one and two, then the rest of the week is spent learning how to build a huge wicker effigy of a man for burning English people and baby animals in while they all stand naked, swinging their arms and eating haggis.

I much prefer calling call centres in Bombay, or Mumbai, or whatever it’s called at the moment. Yes, yes, I know Bombay was the colonial name and we need to respect the Indian peoples’ name for their own city, but how come you don’t see Mumbai potatoes on the menu in Indian restaurants eh?

However, my favourite call centre is the Orange mobile phone one. They’re usually based in the north east of England, so this brings its own language barrier, but the people, “associates”, I think they’re called these days, are always brilliant. You phone up, get put on hold, but get to listen to chart music instead of Vivaldi (or Beethoven, whichever it was) and when you get through, the associates do anything to keep you as a customer, even if you have no intention of leaving the company.

“Hello, I’d like to know what my handset upgrade options are please?”

“Oh, are you thinking of leaving Orange?”

“No, I just want to know whether I can get a new handset and how much it’ll cost me.”

“I’m sorry to hear that Sniffy, we really value our customers and don’t want to see them leave. I’ll put you through to our customer retention department and tell them that you’re going to leave unless we give you the best handset possible for free.”

Eh?

Next weekend’s Mail on Sunday is actually giving away a free CD of all our on-hold music hits. Imagine that?

Implicit association
Because I’m not quite insecure enough about my personality, I visited Harvard’s Implicit Association Project website and had a look at the tests you can take there. Implicit association tests measure a person’s subconscious attitude to a variety of things: sexuality, race, gender, age, curly hair.

The tests work by measuring reaction times when images relating to, for example homosexuality, are associated with words relating to good (“glorious”, “joy”, “fabulous”, “dahling”) or bad (“awful”, “hate”, “whatthefuckareyouthinkingthat’shideous!”).

I took the race one and found that moderately favour white people over black people. I suppose this is understandable because of my cultural background and upbringing. I’m not a racialist, honest, no I love black people, honest!

When I took the sexuality test, I found out that I have a strong preference for straight people. That’s because most queers (well, lesbians) are self obsessed, mental, Guardian-reading, lentil-knitting, duplicitous, selfish fucking cunts, that’s why.