Further to this cheery little post I received a chirpy answerphone message from some woman from nPower's Complaints department saying "We've checked our records and nothing is wrong, so we've closed your complaint".

Which is lovely, and I'm glad that she's so happy, but when my complaint is that their records are at fault, using them as the method of determining whether or not my complaint is valid or not, and therefore whether it needs to be actioned or not is a little stupid, no?

It will surprise no-one that I have been on hold for 20 minutes without talking to a human being yet. But it's okay, because "my call is important to us".

Do they not realise that the longer I'm on hold, the more shit they're going to get? Surely someone in the call centre business has worked out that simple equation?

I would consider going to the watchdogs about this, but frankly, they're EnergyWatch whose website is at http://www.energywatch.org.uk/

Anyone following that link will see why I'm not holding out great hopes for them to be my best advocate.

Edit to add, mostly as a note to myself: Having spoken to the lovely Sandra, who was the person who left the message for me this morning (What are the chances of that? It's almost like their complaints department is only a couple of people!) and having been on the phone from 13:48 to 14:38 (of which 40 minutes was me explaining to her the exact same things I explained to the person I talked to on 12th August) nothing has moved forwards in the last 6 weeks because my complaint was in a queue.

She has promised:

1. To send me the NPower complaints policy
2. Once the matter is resolved, to compensate me for both the cost of my phone calls and my time wasted over this matter.
3. To pass the details on to the cross metering department so that they can arrange an appointment to visit and see that the meters are different
4. To make a note that if the matter is not moved forward significantly in the next 6 weeks (Which makes it noon on 11th November 2008) that I have told NPower that's the point I'll be contacting Energywatch.

Further Edit: Sandra has rung back and found that the meter I claim is in my basement is actually on my records, and that when they changed my account number, that somehow the meter serial number got mis-assigned. This speeds things up considerably as they now don't have to send someone out, but can just re-calculate my bill. She's now estimating 2 - 3 weeks for resolution for that. That's the 21st October. I look forward with interest to the resolution.