We’ve had an account with Scottish Power since we moved here. It was one of those tariffs where you spread the cost over the year so that you don’t get any nasty surprises.

In March they dropped my payments by thirty quid a month. Naively, I trusted that they knew what they were doing. Clearly they didn’t, because three months later they whacked them back up by sixty quid a month. Exactly the sort of crap I wanted to avoid.

I was given a change over date of 13 July, so when I saw that they’d taken a slab of money at the beginning of July and then at the end I sort of reasonably assumed that they had taken their final payment and closed the direct debit. I was wrong to trust them there as well. Turns out that they had got the meter reading from my new supplier on 12 July and took 16 days to apply only the gas reading to the account and take the money. The electricity reading apparently takes an excruciating 25 days for them to process.

So then the phone calls chasing payment start. First thing on Wednesday morning when I’m at work. I politely tell them that I can’t deal with things when I’m at work and follow this up with an email to the same effect. Doesn’t stop them calling me twice more that day. That night I fired off another email, this time to their chief executive. Thursday is a doozy – no less than five calls, on my mobile, during working hours, despite them having been expressly told that this was not acceptable.

It wasn’t until Friday afternoon that they finally stopped calling me.

And the response from the CEO’s office? A rather half-hearted apology which fails to answer a LOT of the questions and a “goodwill” gesture of a measly thirty quid.

Do NOT deal with these people.