More musak

At reference 1, I reported making an appointment with a Thames Waterman for the middle of March. While today I find I still had a good sized bill, with payment due in a few days now. I thought maybe it would be prudent to tell them that I was not going to pay it - although I would be prepared to pay the sort of modest amount I have usually paid in the past. Or perhaps the rate that customers without meters pay. Leaving the bill standing on my account for any length of time might make me liable. Who knows?

Online options still not covering the need, I phone their main support number, a call that ended up taking 43 minutes and 38 seconds, with most of that time being spent - in eight periods, separated by brief chats with the operator - listening to their dreadful musak.

A call which started with their computer failing to understand that I had keyed '2'.

I then got through the birth date test - without my having done anything since I failed this same test last time around.

At the end of all this, I was given a shiny new reference number and told that someone would call me to arrange a time to fix the meter within the next ten days. No, I did not need to worry about the other appointment, in mid March, and I did not need to worry about the bill. It was all going to be sorted out.

Afterwards, I wondered whether the apparent difficulty that the operator had with simple concepts like 'your engineer has already told us that your meter is leaking' was all part of a ploy to wear the customer down. A real customer does not have anything like the patience of a chatbot pretending to be a dumb operator. And anyway, pensioners have not got anything better to do with their time. Sitting on their phones at home is much more healthy for them than sitting in Wetherspoon's.

PS 1: I suppose we have had a lot of rain recently and the reservoirs are fairly full. No need for Thanes Water to prioritise piffling domestic meter leaks. More important matters to attend to.

PS 2: for the avoidance of doubt, I thought I was talking to a real person not a chatbot. Although it is entirely possible that s/he had a number of us on the go at the same time.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/01/thames-water-again.html.

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