There are times in life when you have to tackle a problem from a new direction when all else fails. Here’s an example.
About two years ago I started to get an additional bill from British Gas. I pay my bill by direct debit and only have one meter. So I cast this new bill aside anonymously addressed to ‘The Occupier’. But from then on I started to receive this additional charge every quarter. Alarmingly each time the bill arrived, the amount increased.
So I protested to British Gas. Each time I phoned - and it was many - I would have to go through process of giving all of my details and relay the story, which became tedious. You would have thought in this age of high-speed technology that all this stuff would be digitally stored? Not a bit of it.
After two years of receiving these bills, which by this time had risen to over £2,500, I started to get letters threatening to disconnect the gas, along with a whole list of charges that would be incurred in order to be reconnected. Whenever I phoned I was assured that I would not receive any more bills. But they kept on coming. I was stuck in a Kafkaesque merry-go-round. I’d tried everything, Mr. nice guy, Mr. Angry, Mr. Indignant, nothing worked.
Then I had a brain wave. What if a very fragile and vulnerable old man now lived at my address? What if this man was so distressed at receiving these bills that it was making him ill? Brilliant. So I became that frail, worried old man. Listen to the result here...
Well, it did the trick. Many apology phone calls from a dedicated gas board employee assuring me that they would get to the bottom of the problem. And they eventually did. The moral of the story is that the answered to a tricky problem can often be found within us. You just have to think differently.