Waffle

My gas company has just socked me with a bill for € 826! Luckily I have that much in my savings account, because I put it aside to pay taxes with...
Studying the bill, it looks as if the cause of this little surprise isn't me stoking the central heating up to sauna levels, but instead the fact that they haven't billed me for monthly payments since September of 2002! It was about that time that I switched ("green") electricity providers from the same company that provides the gas company to another, who - it appears - also do their billing through the old company. Yay for utilities market liberalisation. The first few months after that, I got two identical monthly bills each month for the electricity (of which I paid only one until the double bills stopped coming) but none for the gas. It seems that pay time has come today.
So, I've got it, I clearly owe it to them, but I'll be sad to say goodbye to it. Just when I was thinking about buying a flat screen for the home PC out of those savings.
It's not leaving me with a high opinion of the gas company's efficiency or the quality of their record-keeping. Of course, it's arguably atrocious record-keeping on my part as well, but that's not exactly news to me, and besides I don't spend millions of Euros on accountants and enterprise-level databases each year.

I also note that the new monthly payment starting this month is quite a bit higher than the last one. Admittedly, getting cable from them may explain part of the difference, but still, there's a second setback hidden in that first one.