The Daily Novel

Arrived in our London flat to find no fewer than 19 letters from BT reminding us of the total now overdue of £126.50 all posted in the first few days of July. The mind boggles.

As long-standing readers of this blog will know this money is the accumulation of monthly phone rentals for the phone in our flat which we moved into an August 1st last year, when we sold our house in the next street. BT were supposed to transfer our old number, which we had had for 39 years, to the new flat. They failed. But early in September they connected the line to an entirely different number, much to the irritation of a Gospel Oak neighbour whose number it had been for 17 years, and who suddenly found that HIS phone had gone dead.

Phone calls from him and us managed to reverse that. And BT assured me that they would now connect my old number. They didn’t.

By this time I had spent about fifty pounds in mobile phone bills together with emails. At this point I decided that I was wasting far too much time, so I cancelled my order by email. To my astonishment BT then started to send me bills for the telephone on my old number, asking me for the monthly rental.

Inside the flat the phone is totally dead. But if you ring from outside it rings as if it is connected for a long time, and then stops: not even a message saying you have dialled an incorrect number.

At this point I wrote to my contacts and told them I was going to use my mobile in London and that they should scrub my old London number out of their address books.

I wrote two or three blogs on this last Autumn and even alerted the BT press officer suggest he get BT’s new chairman, Sir Michael Rake, to do something.

To no avail. BT continues to send reminders by post. Apparently they don’t take any account of phone calls or read their email. Instead they spend the shareholders’ money on snail mail.

This is a real irony. Because when the Post Office was privitised BT took all rich profit prospects whereas the loss making mail remained a separate entity.

So perhaps Sir Michael Rake and all the other highly paid BT men have been stricken by bad conscience and are deliberately paying out money to the poor postmen.

Or, perhaps, they are just grossly inefficient.

BT’s letters are putting money into the Pos