02.13.09

My First Battle with British Bureaucracy

Posted in The Story, Rants and Raves, Other Fun at 7:37 am by Chef Matt

It was 11:30 at night when suddenly the power in my flat went out. I wasn’t exactly sure what had happened, which is always the case when your power first goes out, but I knew enough to check the circuit breaker. Everything in there was in fine shape, so I decided to call the emergency number for the leasing agents. It was late, and it took a while to get someone to answer (the emergency number - go figure) but he was unfailingly polite given the circumstances. I explained that my power had suddenly gone off, while all my neighbors were fine, and he explained, “I’ll leave a message with your contact to call you in the morning, since I don’t think I could get someone to stop around at this time of night.”

Part of the problem with the lights being out is that my flat is still full of moving boxes…

Since the majority of my readers are American, allow me to translate that last sentence into American from British for you. “It’s nighttime you asshole, your lights are SUPPOSED to be out. Stop calling me, numb-nuts and we’ll deal with it in the morning.”

Morning came around, and with the lights still out, I called my leasing agent once again. He informed me that the house was under warranty with the building company still (it’s a new flat) and so any problems should be addressed with them. I called the housing company and they said that the leasing agent should be able to get me in touch with the power company. I called the power company’s emergency number (supposedly for outages) and nobody was there to answer the phone.

Sigh.

It was about this time that a thought began creeping into my subconscious like an unwelcome relative - I didn’t want it there, and it wouldn’t leave… I had been out of the country for 2 months… could it be that the electric bill had not been paid?

It was about this time that I decided to break a minor law, and open some of the envelopes addressed to my landlord that for some reason had been delivered to us. The first one was from the electric company. In large red letters it read:

“Good Lord Watson! Have a look at this!!”

FINAL NOTICE OF OVERDUE BILL

Ah. For those of us in the detective industry, we call this “a clue.”

So I called the number on the bill allotted for “instant payments” and when I gave the overly-eager account rep my account number, he informed me that this account had been closed.

Wait. What?…

“Yeah, the bill you have there was paid, and the account was closed and transferred over to the company letting your flat.”

“So the bills have all been paid?”

“Yeah, you’re fine, we haven’t cut you off.”

I wasn’t sure if this was good news or bad news… It’s nice to know my credit rating was still intact, but by the same token, I was still - quite literally - in the dark.

So I called the building people again and explained that I had checked with the power company, and by their reckoning, I was supposed to have power. The incredibly nice lady at the other end relented, and sent someone around to take a look. This man confirmed that my lights were out and the circuit breaker was good, but he noticed that I wasn’t even getting power to my meter. “Well, that’s Southern Electric’s area. We deal with it once the power reaches the meter. You’ll have to call them.”

Back on the phone to the emergency outage number, I was relieved to see that someone had finally decided to show up to work. They offered to send a technician right around. About half an hour later, he arrived, and confirmed that my power was out (thank God, I thought there was some sort of collective insanity going around) and indeed it was not reaching my meter. His special power that separated him from the last guy who had stopped by was that he was able to go out to the street to make sure there was electricity coming in from the main power lines. A few minutes later, he knocked on the door to tell me that everything was fine at the street, which meant he had to send around a different kind of technician to work on it.

“When will that be?…”

Yeah. Creepy.

“Later today mate,” he said with a wink. I’ve never felt more unsettled by a man winking at me before - and that includes the guy who did it to me in a strip club bathroom…

Several hours later, two men stopped around to take a look at the situation. These were the first guys who actually pulled out something I would refer to as “tools” to begin working on the problem. Obviously, these were the guys I needed all along because in no time, they had all kinds of cool gadgets that made variously-pitched beeping noises hooked up to my power lines, and within 5 minutes the obviously senior of the two men asked me, without looking up from his beeping device, “How many meters is it to your front door?”

“From where you’re standing?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know… umm… five? Six?” I guessed, looking down the hallway.

“Ah good, that mean’s we’ll only have to dig outside.”

Wait. What?

The Hole. Click for larger image.

Apparently this beeping device could pinpoint exactly where in the line the problem was, and it was telling us all (well OK, just this other guy) that the problem was exactly 9.2 meters down the line. The two guys got out some more big beeping things to find the line in my driveway, and soon they were full on digging up the front of my house. God bless these two electrical company soldiers - through the dark and cold, they dug one hell of a trench and found the main supply line to my house, with a tiny nick in it, buried 5 feet below my driveway. They replaced it, and soon my house sprang to life with a fresh dose of electrical juice.

Total power outage time: 22 hours

Phone calls made: 9

Cost to me: £10 in cell phone minutes. (The repair was on Southern Electric’s dime.)

Cups of tea consumed by repair people: 7

Time to re-fill hole in front of my house: 2 days and counting… I wonder who I have to call for that?

Chef Matt

Stumble it!

Permalink