How many years will those lies and SPAM carry on for? There’s no “opt out”.

EVERAL years ago I wrote about the spamming I had been receiving about spy meters. I must have been nagged about it about 100 times already. It’s very time consuming at this rate and frequency. They even phone us sometimes to nag us about it.

By their own admission, more than a third of their clients do not want spy meters. So we’re not some tiny minority or a ‘fringe’.

Anyway, in recent days they kept spamming me some more and even a day after they told me it would stop they carried on as usual. See below.

E.ON Next wrote on 19/02/2024 15:20:
> Hi Roy Schestowitz,????
>
> Thank you for your email.
>
> I am Shameemah Your Energy Specialist that will be assisting you today.
>
> We have reviewed your account and due to what you have mentioned we have updated your email address on the account to the one you have provided us with [...].
>
> We have done a few health checks on the account and we can see that we do require up to date meter readings this is to avoid your readings being estimated and we need regular readings to bill your account accurately to that you won’t be under or over charged as this could lead to future debt onto your account and we do not want that.
>
> To avoid this I know the days can get busy and can forget we do see that you are eligible to have a free smart meter installed its not complicated basically like the normal meter, however with a smart meter we will be getting readings automatically without you have to send manual readings regularly, your account will be billed regularly and accurately, you will also receive a free in home display a monitor which you will be able to monitor your usage.
>
> Before I can book your appointment there are just a few questions I need you to answer so I can ensure the appointment is correct and the engineer has all the information they’re going to need on the day.

I already told you, REPEATEDLY, to stop spamming me about this.

You agreed but didn’t keep the promise.

You’re still doing this.

Please STOP.

Ross from E.ON Next wrote on 19/02/2024 18:42:
> Hello Roy.
>
> I will remove correspondence about this from your account.

Nonsense. The SPAM continues just less than 24 hours later.
I will relay to you the SPAM.

At this stage I might just terminate the contract with you and report the SPAM, or unsolicited mail.

Notice the date on this email

——– Forwarded Message ——–
Subject: smart meters
Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2024 11:30:47 +0000
From: Shameemah from E.ON Next <shameemah.bowers@eon-next-cabac46b5ea2.intercom-mail.com>

Hi Roy Schestowitz,????

Thank you for your email.

I am Shameemah Your Energy Specialist that will be assisting you today.

We have reviewed your account and due to what you have mentioned we have updated your email address on the account to the one you have provided us with ….

[then pushing for spy meters again]

WO months ago a BT advisor said I would not be charged 10 pounds (spurious fee). He assured me it would not happen and if it did happen, I should phone to rectify it.

Weeks passed and they did charge me, contrary to what their staff had said. So I phone up, waited on the line for a very long time, and they then said they would remove that charge. They even sent a formal E-mail to confirm the charge would be canceled.

Today the bill came and the correction has still not been made. This means that I already needed to get on the phone with BT thrice to rectify the issue. Maybe the strategy is to tire me down, hoping that a very busy lifestyle would lead to defeatism and make BT a little richer (just due to these tiring barriers and several false promises).

That’s a lot of trouble to go through, basically to argue over money that is barely worth the time anymore.

I am still on the phone at this very moment. Maybe all those calls have thus far totalled at one hour and it’s still not resolved.

Quick update: Moments ago the person on the line (third person already) said he would escalate this to his manager because something went wrong. It’s not my fault but theirs; the person I spoke to does not even know how to sort this out.

wrote about the misuse of technology to worsen customer service just less than a day ago and thought I’d expand in my personal blog, based on a personal story.

Just over a day ago I went to the local bank and then visited 2 more banks. I could not help but notice that the people facing public at the bank are young and inexperienced, maybe by intention. This makes them not only cheap to employ but also rather useless as advisors or whatever else you might need. It’s like talking to an intern, not even a clerk, or a person herding people into “apps”/self-checkout (the latter is a good analogy for what bank “apps” actually are).

I spoke to a friend about it and he told me it is the same at the one remaining bank office where he lives. He said “they probably get minimum wage, if that…”

Maybe part-time temporary hanging by a thread, obeying every request from just about anyone else in the branch.

Just for the record, Nationwide had a young and borderline rude ‘clerk’, who wasn’t even a clerk and was totally not helpful, probably even lying to prevent me talking to the supervisor (lying is bad, no matter what). At NatWest, however, they had like a 50-year old, who not only escorted me for advice at the cushy office but also phoned the number for me and let me have the room for myself (to talk to “Richard” over the telephone). I thanked her at the end. That was good service. In the past I ranted a lot about NatWest, but on that occasion the service was better. Having said that, they too try to send people to “apps” and “Web sites”…

I am neither young or old, so I can probably not be accused of ageism when I say older workers tend to be nicer, at least at banks; or as a friend put it, “probably the youngest are not just rude but full of rage and lash out or more commonly just plain mean…”

I said that when you are 20-25 and have no prospect of long-term career in the discipline, the desire to learn in depth the job – and its context – may diminish because there is something to be said about giving assurances to professionals and consistent specialities.

But this leads me to the main subject/purpose of this post, which is to rant about banks expecting people to carry around a mobile “phone” and then install (and in turn learn) proprietary “apps” instead of doing things over the counter. According to media in Zimbabwe, as per a report from the other day, banks there got rid of about 75% of their workers. Not only is this bad for employment; it also means that many services previously done by skilled people are no longer offered. The banks go through a process of “enshittification” for the purpose of “cost-savings” and we all – collectively – pay the price. Resist and don’t let them get away with it. Demand that they have staff you can speak to, not some “app” you can download if you carry around a spying device (you ought not).

Summary: Today we conclude this week’s series, which explained how Sirius isn’t just funded by the British government but is also protected by the British government; HMRC is not responding to fraud reports (sent exactly 4 weeks ago) and Action Fraud, overseen by a client of Sirius (since 2013), does not seem to have even opened the Pension Fraud complaint (it sent a template response after exactly 4 weeks^*)

WHEN we finally reach Tuesday or Wednesday (next week) it will be 4 weeks since my Member of Parliament contacted Action Fraud regarding the pension fraud complaint that Action Fraud is ignoring. Action Fraud has still not bothered responding to her. I’m not the sole victim of this fraud. Former colleagues were robbed as well (a lot of money was covertly stolen). For the time being we’re closing this series and will post another further update/s anew. This isn’t the end. This is only the beginning of a rather broad political scandal. Can one trust a government to regulate itself or its contractors? Can one complain to a government about abuse against its own workers? This in many ways resembles the EPO scandals. The EPO even invented its own Ombuds office or “EPO’s Ombuds service”, created and controlled by those who spent over a decade committing crimes at the EPO. Such “Ombuds” is farcical; it’s an exercise in optics (giving people out there the mere illusion of accountability).

Gaslighting and/or self-induced defeatism (learned helplessness) is a potent weapon leveraged against the impatient and unmotivated. We’re neither impatient nor unmotivated, so this will carry on and on until a resolution is found and the perpetrators of the crime are arrested.
_____
^* Out of business hours on a weekend. It seems safe to assume no actual person sent that.

All about bundling and complicated structuring for tiers (artificially-degraded services)

moved to fibre-optics earlier this year. It was already possible in 2021, but following a series of blunders I decided to delay the transition by nearly 2 years.

The thing about it this year is, BT lied about various things. It also lied about speeds (downstream and upstream) of the connection. How do I know? Well, the other day I did large uploads and then BT all of a sudden phoned me. It was a sales rep. He almost immediately started asking me if I wanted to upgrade speeds. I politely declined and explained why.

But now it’s changing some more. It now ‘feels’ different; now they seem to be severely throttling my uploads (probably to upsell again after a ‘free trial’ which lasted a fortnight; after this trial they tried to upsell it several times). How desperate are they for extra money?

Everyone knows that fibre should not be 100kB/sec upstream, no matter what (unless there is something wrong at the other end, the receiving end).

They want more money, so they hobble/throttle by upstream speeds and then phone me to ask me to pay more. They want me pay yet more money to get what I ALREADY paid for. Not nice. Will they be doing so more aggressively once they’ve transitions almost everyone to fibre-optics, under-delivering intentionally?

Your misery and impatience should not be their profit prospect. Because then they have a financial incentive to make you miserable or less productive.

BT “customer services” may fancy saying they don’t intentionally slow down connections, but of course they do. Selling you back the “real” speed is part of the business model. It’s a class system.

Video download link | md5sum 3423a47dfdeaf06eccf9210c582f0523
Energy Suppliers and Gas Pipes
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

THE power supplier we have is not the power supplier we chose. It was inherited by us when we moved in a decade ago and it has since then been acquired by another company, which I’ve endlessly ranted about in the past. The original company, nPower, was relatively OK, but E.ON Next sucks. The above recording is my phonecall or reach-out to E.ON Next regarding what happened with Cadent Gas Limited — a company that basically ruined my entire day and might ruin several more days ahead. Cadent Gas Limited management is unapologetic about it, but at least E.ON Next promises to follow up with a call some time later (unspecified time), so maybe there will be updates ahead.

Is it not astounding that E.ON Next charges almost 150 pounds just to turn off the gas? It sounds like a penalty, not a sane bill for such a trivial job. In a free market of true competition, would such penalties exist? Also, why aren’t the pipes managed by the Council anyway? Why has everything been outsourced to opportunistic privatisers?

In their own words (lies or contradictions included):

Summary: After almost 40 days Standard Life finally gets back (in writing) to victims of the fraud at Sirius ‘Open Source’; the response is designed to help Standard Life “wash its hands” without actually tackling fraud committed in its name (and with documents produced by Standard Life, not forged)

HOURS after I prodded Standard Life by E-mail they finally got back to me (and others) with something more concrete. As expected, they did nothing to actually solve the problem and in the process they resorted to lying to us about the dates.

“I got response from standard life,” one former colleague told me.

“They have stated I can confirm Standard Life has administered a pension scheme for Sirius Corporation Plc from July 2009 until December 2012. Unfortunately, there is no record of you joining the scheme during that time and it would not have been possible to join after the Scheme closed in 2012.”

Notice the above. They just used templates. They barely investigated anything on an individual basis, yet in their PDF they made it seem like it was tailored to the recipient, including individual passwords. All they changed was the name of the person and maybe the case number.

My former colleague noticed a glaring anomaly in their narrative/story. “This seems to be slightly different to what you have been told,” the former colleague said, “as I think you said it was moved in 2018.”

“2016″ was said repeatedly to me by the manager, on several occasions. So either the above letter contains a lie or the managers lied to me repeatedly over the telephone.

Here is the message I received:

Dear Dr Schestowitz

I’ve completed my investigation of your concerns since I last contacted you on 29 March 2023. Thank you for your patience.

I’ve attached a letter which outlines our position [...]

If you have any questions, or you are having a problem accessing the letter, please let me know.

Yours sincerely

???????? ??????????????

Customer Relations

slcomplaints@standardlife.com

The name is in the image, but we don’t want that in text.

This is more like a cover-up, not an investigation. Did it take them almost 40 days to just run a search through a database? Really!?

Did they bother contacting authorities? Did they contact Sirius?

They sent the same thing to other victims in order to cover things up, talking like a lawyers’ department, looking to cover their own behind while solving nothing at all. If this is how pensions are managed in the UK (this is a very large provider), then we’re in serious trouble.

Notice that they are not saying there’s no crime, they just resort to the equivalent of “try another department” or “none of our business!”

As a reminder, I still have papers from Standard Life with my full name, date of birth, and account/scheme code/numbers on them. I still have countless payslips showing pension contributions were made. Standard Life cannot simply claim to have nothing to do with it; Standard Life basically legitimised a fraud. The perpetrators are still not held accountable. Two of them are in the UK and one is a fugitive in the United States, residing not far from Bill Gates, whom he took money from under an NDA.