Not your usual Saturday morning

I'm still pretty shattered from the antibiotics with which I've been fighting a chest infection and work has been quite hectic so I was looking forward to chilling out on our sofa on a Friday night. As usual, I noisily fell asleep round about 10pm and only briefly woke up to see Daniel Craig doing something vaguely Bond-related on tv, and then I went back under. OH tucked me into several layers of blanket and left me to it.

Woke up on the sofa in the morning -- it was around half past six -- and after putting the coffee on, I went online to check my emails and the state of the world. The state of the world was unremarkable but one email interested me. Our new energy supplier had written to tell me our very first bill was available online. Exciting.  I logged on. And nearly had a stroke. For 3 months' worth of gas, they wanted £6200.

When I checked the breakdown of the bill, it was pretty clear what had happened -- our previous supplier had omitted to update the serial number of a changed gas meter and passed on the wrong meter number to our new supplier so the units counted were still in cubic feet when they should have been in cubic metres. It wasn't really the new guys' fault but our new supplier did omit to carry out some basic quality controls, otherwise they would have noticed that 2 people and an elderly cat rattling around a three-bedroom semi are highly unlikely to have used up 98,888 kilowatt hours in a month.

But the bill confirmed again why I will never go direct debit with anyone, regardless of the sweeteners waved at me. To think these people would have blithely tried to suck £6200 off our current account! I marched upstairs and into OH's bedroom. "Wake up," I said by way of a romantic greeting, "I'm making coffee, and you'll need it because the gas people have just charged us over 6000 quid for our first bill." OH remained his usual unflappable self. "It's obviously a mistake," he mumbled and continued to sleep.

I went back downstairs, forgot all about the coffee and composed a very long-winded, angrily Teutonic complaint via email in between trying to contort myself round OH's bubbling, brewing demijohns under the stairs to take a picture of the gas meter with my asthmatic seven-year-old mobile phone, and failing. At 9am, I decided to kick OH out of bed and into action -- he's the one with the high-end photo gear -- so I brought him coffee upstairs and continued to wail loudly about evil energy companies. OH just laughed and said, well, now it's clear that that's how they fund their Chairman's well-documented drug habit.

After a bit of a palaver on the phone (despite all my amateur photography, I had failed to capture the new meters serial number), OH sorted it out with a friendly guy named Shaun, who sounded very used to this sort of complaint and invited us to email them pictures of the new meter and they would take it from there. No doubt it will take them 6 weeks to resolve and the debt collectors will come and seize the car.

"Why are such mistakes never in our favour?" I asked OH later in the Lidl car park. "Why do I never discover a company like this accidentally putting my account £6200 in the black?" OH shrugged, his mind already on our latest Lidl purchase, a 2800-Watt petrol generator, a 40-kilogram monster box in the boot of our car. (Of which in another post)