Apathy Sketchpad

From: Andrew Taylor (taylor.andrew@gmail.com)
To: communications@britishgas.co.uk,
Date: Jan 5, 2008 2:25 PM
Subject: Electricity meter reading

While I was away over Christmas, you put a bit of card under my door saying you couldn’t read my meter (which in fact you could as it is not inside my flat). It said I was to provide a reading within three days, which I didn’t because I didn’t get back to read the card for about a week. I tried to text you the details, as instructed, and your reply said my ID number had to be 13 digits, which it was, not least because I’d copied it from the card as you instructed. I tried your automated phone service, but this too failed to recognise my number, leading me to suspect that you wrote it down wrong (and that there is a bug in your text service that causes it to reply “number wrong length” when it means “number not recognised”). I also tried your non-automated phone service, but nobody answered and I got bored of listening to your mindless propaganda — I’m already your customer; you don’t need to advertise to me — so I hung up in case you were charging me for listening to commercials.

I’m more than happy to provide you with my meter reading but you aren’t making it easy.

Andrew

From: postmaster@centrica-gw.com
To: taylor.andrew@gmail.com,
Date: Jan 5, 2008 3:58 PM
Subject: Delivery Status Notification (Failure)

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.

Unable to deliver message to the following recipients, because the message was forwarded more than the maximum allowed times. This could indicate a mail loop.