My neighbour (who has been living in her house for only a couple of months) asked me what my gas bill normally is because hers was ridiculously high - like, in the high $300s. I told her mine is normally in the $125 ball park.
Then I get a bill just shy of $430.
So I say to myself: "this isn't right, I shall query it." This query eventually takes the form of two different chat conversations (due to the fact that I tried on my phone, gave up and then tried again on my computer), which leads to much confusion on behalf of the 6 chat operators who eventually have something to do with the two chats/email trains over the course of the next few days. Part of the confusion arises from the fact that several of the operators want me to be logged into my My Account, but I couldn't set up my My Account account as it refused to accept my email address, phone number, name or address as being in the system.
Eventually I am told that the bill is completely accurate, because they hadn't actually read my gas meter for the past few few quarters and had underestimated my usage. Now that they had actually laid eyeballs on the meter, they were making up for the previous shortfall in this bill. None of this was outlined or explained in the bill itself. They just decided call the extra usage "September" and pretend it was a normal bill with nothing to add.
Now, there is no reason for anyone to not read my gas meter. It isn't even behind a fence. If you had a bit of stamina, you could access my meter even if you were in a wheelchair. They simply didn't check it for most of the year, and then decided that this was my problem and I could cough up an unexpected extra $300 in this bill (in the lead up to the Christmas holidays, mind) to make up for that.
But it's okay - since I queried it, they'll give me an extension for the bill if I need one. How kind.
And while my neighbour's gas bill didn't make sense based on her actual usage, it *does* make sense if they didn't bother checking the meters for every house in my street and she is being charged the shortfall from Origin undercharging the previous tenants. Which is very much Not Cool.
I mentioned to Origin that, if the bill wasn't a mistake, then it was abominably poor service and quite unforgivable. I stated quite clearly that if the bill was "correct", my follow up question was "how do I cancel my gas service?"
The screenshot shows the response from the seventh person to take over my question (no doubt autogenerated from closing one of the two chats, but still a bit galling).
Now, obviously the meter says what the meter says, and they are charging me for the gas I have used. My issue is that for a long time now I've been basing my budgeting on paying approximately $125 a quarter for gas. If the bill had accurately reflected the correct price for the gas I was using, I possibly would have left Origin ages ago. Plus, I've been meaning to switch to something more ecologically sound, but while I was willing to live with the price of gas as it was in my bill, I was waiting to get a bit more cushioning in my savings before switching to solar.
Essentially, they've been lying to me about how much my gas usage costs so that I wasn't able to make informed decisions. And they've just been jolly lazy about not taking accurate meter readings.
And I'm annoyed by the sudden and unexplained sharp increase in billing - which would make budgeting for this month impossible if I was in a more precarious financial position.
And I'm really, *really* annoyed by the way their bad service has lumped my neighbour with a bill for gas she didn't actually use.
And I'm really, *really* annoyed by the way their bad service has lumped my neighbour with a bill for gas she didn't actually use.
