NPOWER ARE USELESS

This is how much I HATE NPower.

They are useless, pathetic, rubbish, incompetent, unhelpful, rubbish and did I mention useless?! Ugh, I am so so so fed up with them that even three months after we've moved out of the house they were suppling to I'm still not rid of their pestering.

They are like a blood-sucking leach that just won't die.

Here's a brief run-down of my/our dealings with NPower this year. October: we move into the house and set up a gas and electric account with NPower. They supplied the previous tennants so it made sense. The 'nice' man I spoke to seemed incapable of comprehending that I might not be the world's leading expert on gas and electricity and so I came off the phone non the wiser as to how much we were going to pay or when etc.

Then we get to December and although I don't remember the details (I tried to block them from my memory) we realised that no money had been taken from the Direct Debit scheme we'd set up (or thought we had at any rate). So in January I rang again and the 'helpful' lady told me that we hadn't actually set up an electricity account and did I want to there and then? I have no idea where we'd been getting electricity from for three months, and when I asked if she was going to back-charge us from October she seemed to say no because we hadn't set up an account. Whatever.

On to Easter and they send us a letter saying that our power usage doesn't match the meter readings they have for us so they're going to come round and get a meter reading themselves. The idea of different tennants year on year seems to create a 'does not compute' message with them where they just go into overdrive and start to panic. Apparantly we couldn't have a statement of usage until we'd lived there a year... having been told that we wouldn't be there a year because we are students they mumbled something incoherent and probably went to sit in a dark corner to recover from the total stress of being asked a question that didn't have an answer that a trained monkey could have figured out.

So then we leave the house and come to the point where we cancel the gas and electricity accounts with NPower to be shut of them forever. In an ideal world anyway. The first sign I had that things had not gone to plan was when they took the direct debit payment from my account after we'd cancelled our contract with them. Then they sent the bill to the Durham address instead of to Heather. A phone call today confirmed that they have no record of the account being cancelled and seeing as I don't have the meter reading here with me they're going to take an estimate and give me a final statement from that. As if. Come hell or high water I'll get them a meter reading. There is no way I'm letting them guess how much we owe them.

I'm sorry, but fucking useless. Everything they've done so far has been wrong. How is it so difficult to do something so simple?!?!?!?!?! So now I'm going to have to spend the next few days on the phone trying to fix their incompetence. The only good thing I can see is that I'll get over my phobia of phones.

So. That's how much I hate NPower. I think I'll train thousands of hamsters to run in wheels and generate my own energy in the future. Or build solar panels, or live next to a river and set up a hydro-electric system.... any one of those seems more appealling than this mess right now.

I did have a lovely holiday, it's just so depressing to have to come back to something so horrible. It's going to take ages to sort out and it'll stay on my mind until it is well and truely sorted. Wonderful.