Well, tonight is looking promising.
I have only been here for two and a half hours and already I have earned £3.90, so things are looking good.
Mark is not here. Mark is in his shed doing something important to the large chunk of rusty metal he is planning to attach to the camper van. He has been storing this in the conservatory in case it suffers from a misadventure in the yard. Of course I do not wish it to encounter any kind of misfortune but our conservatory no longer looks like the Disneyland Hotel.
It didn’t look much like the Disneyland Hotel anyway when I came out, due to the pile of Autoparts deliveries by the back door and the huge stack of drying firewood next to the flowerbed.
He has been at work today, so the camper van project has not made any further progress, and I have been doing domestic things, not the least of which has been hours and hours spent on the telephone to the Gas Board, trying yet again to prise out of them the two hundred quid that they owe us.
Obviously I was not on the telephone for all that time. I put the speaker on and laid the receiver on my desk so that I could get on with other, more interesting tasks, to a background lilting of the Gas Board’s annoying Your Call Is Important To Us music.
I have telephoned them so many times that this morning I knew my Sixteen Figure Account Number On Your Telephone Keypad off by heart. I do not have an account with them in any case, the cash sum in question is left over from when I was transferred to them when Bulb went pop last year, and the Government, in their wisdom, gave all cash that Bulb owed to people to British Gas to redistribute, presumably among their managing directors to spend on cocktails in the bar on their holidays.
Today I explained wearily that they owed me some money and I would like it please, and kindly don’t tell me again that you have already given it to me because we both know perfectly well that you haven’t. If I had two hundred quid I would not be sitting in your telephone queueing system listening to your passive-aggressive warnings about not ringing you up whilst I was driving. If I had been driving I would probably be in Scotland by now.
The lady agreed to investigate and then cut me off so I had to start all over again.
The next lady, a couple of hours later, promised that she would call me back in the unlikely circumstance of us being disconnected, and after a little while, to my astonishment, agreed that she had uncovered a mysterious case of British Gas not having paid me after all, and it was all very surprising and she would get on the case right away, madam. I stopped her there and explained that everybody always said that, followed by Yes But I Am Not Like All The Others, and she agreed, and said that this was because all other employees of British Gas’s Indian Call Centre were stupid except her, who was not at all like all the others, and that it was more than obvious the system would not accept an instruction to pay into my bank because my account had been closed and cancelled, and probably buried at the bottom of the Gas Board’s garden for all she could see. Either way it would not allow a payment, and goodness her, could everybody else not have understood such an obvious thing?
I nodded wearily, and enquired how they proposed to pay my money in that circumstance.
She said they would send me a cheque. This would take three weeks to generate in their system followed by another week to post, and then presumably followed by another week in which the bank sat on the cheque and tried to think of an excuse not to give us any money.
I was resigned by then.
I sighed heavily, and said the grown-up equivalent of the teenage Yeah Whatever, and would they just please get on with it, and she wished me a nice day and hung up.
By the sound of it we will have our cash back from British Gas just as trade starts to pick up here in the Lake District.
It is one of the very few occasions in my entire pecuniary history when I would have been very glad to have seen the reinstatement of debtors’ prisons. I would also have added in capital punishment for anybody playing dreadful queueing music on a thirty-second loop.
Either way it will be four whole weeks before I need to call them back and make a fuss about it again.
I suppose that is something to be pleased about.
