Dear National Grid, you are idiots

The long-running saga with getting my gas meters moved is still very much on-going. A while ago I wrote about the fun I had attempting to contact my gas suppliers to find out how I could get the meter moved. After giving up on attempting to phone them, I instead resorted to sending a rather sarcastic and blunt email to their customer support team.

To my surprise, I did actually get a reply. They were very apologetic and refunded the money they stole from my account twice. They even supplied me with the correct numbers to call to get my meters moved. Progress. Or so I thought.

I eventually got round to phoning the National Grid where I was put through to some bloke in India who told me I had to book online. I did as instructed and proceeded to spend the next few hours trying to navigate my way around the mess that claims to be a website.

After eventually finding what looked like the correct link in the maze of badly designed pages, I then went through a tedious process of checking boxes on a very unintuitive web form. It had to be the most infuriating website I have ever come across.

For starters, it was not very clear. The website itself mainly consists of text. Now, being a rather experienced man in the world of websites, I can promise you that nobody reads. Even intelligent people will be drawn to big colourful buttons. All the text across the whole site is bland and there is little distinction between the body text and the important navigation areas. The main links are in exactly the same format as the main category links. Not that there were any main category links. Every single page had an essay at the top of it, which puts me to sleep before it has even loaded in my browser. There is very little imagery on the site which just makes it look boring.

Then we come to the booking form. Now, with something as potentially complicated as a booking form for a piece of equipment that nobody is going to know anything about, a nice and easy, step-by-step process is called for with nice big text and nice big colourful buttons. Any descriptive text should be short, simple and preferably using words with one syllable. Sadly the morons who designed this form decided it would be better to make life difficult.

The form itself was contained within an iFrame on the page. Not only that but every time I checked one of the boxes, it not only refreshed the iFrame but also refreshed the main page. Now, the problem with having a page that refreshes is when you are half way down it, in most cases, it will reload and take you to the top of the page again. This meant the further down the page I got, the more annoying it became because it would refresh both the main page and the iFrame meaning I had to keep scrolling down the page to locate the iFrame and then scroll down the iFrame to the next question every time I checked one of the boxes. This happened for every one of the hundreds of inane questions I was asked. It also caused the air to turn a darker shade of purple.

The questions were also impossible to answer. How the hell am I supposed to know whether I have a U6 or G4 meter? It doesn’t tell me anywhere on the big brown box. How am I supposed to know whether I am going to need excavation work carried out? You’re the bleeding experts.

Anyway, once I got to the bottom of the questionnaire, I found I couldn’t go to the next page because the button marked “continue” was disabled. There was nothing on the page to indicate why this was the case. Using my legendary powers of common sense, I slowly scrolled up the page (the iFrame that is, not the main page) and saw 2 very small yellow triangles which I correctly assumed were indicating that I had missed a required field. This validation was about as obvious as Gordon Brown’s redeeming feature.

I do not consider myself a stupid person. I am certainly very computer literate. When I’m not racing round tracks or writing rants about idiots like the National Grid or Americans, I build websites. What I mean is I design them; I do all the programming in languages with sophisticated names; I design and build databases. If someone like me struggles to use a website, how the hell is an average idiot supposed to use it?

So after 3 hours of resisting the urge to punch a hole through my computer, I finally came to the end and was presented with a quote for nearly £800. I would like to point out that I wish to move my gas meter less than a foot. I only want to move it from an inside wall to an outside wall.

It took me 2 full days to recover from the stress brought on by their website. Once I had calmed down sufficiently to trust myself not to be abusive to them, I phoned them up and asked if they were in fact thieves and why they were charging me the best part of a thousand pounds to move a metal box 50 centimetres. They informed me that it was because I had chosen for National Grid to carry out the excavation work. I did my best to explain that I’m sure I don’t need excavation work but there wasn’t an option for “none”.

Naturally my response was to suggest they come round and ascertain that themselves because I’m hardly qualified to know about such things. It would then be easier for them to give me a quote rather than me guessing what size up-pipe conduit restraining utility system I currently have installed in the gas matrix flux-capacitor.

Evidently this wasn’t possible. It was obviously too logical for them. They said I should just check “other” and if it turns out I need the excavation carried out, they will not carry out the work and will go back without doing anything. Right, Okay. So basically they won’t come out to give me a quote but they will come out, decide they can’t do the work because the quote they couldn’t give was wrong and then leave? Which is more of a waste of time?

So when I went back on the website to alter the quote, it took me another 20 minutes to locate my account. When I tried putting in my username and password it wouldn’t recognise it. Again using my powers of common sense, I selected to have a password reminder sent to me. Well it turned out it wasn’t a password reminder at all. What it did was create a new password for me. This wasn’t the annoying part however. The annoying part was when I entered the new password and it still wouldn’t recognise me. Naturally I was straight back on the phone to Mr Patel at the National Grid Call Centre.

This time I was put through to an Indian chap who sounded even more fed up than I did. I explained my problem and suggested that they find whoever designed and built their website and shoot them through the head. I then ranted for some considerable time about the ridiculousness of not being able to send someone round to give me a proper quote and expecting Joe Public to be able to answer such ridiculous questions, much the amusement of my fiancée.

So anyway, I am now awaiting a call from them to let me know they have amended my quote. I am not expecting a call or an email from them. I fully expect to have to revisit this issue again in another month once I have recovered from my nervous breakdown and finished my anger management classes.

The bottom line is they are very unprofessional. Almost as unprofessional as me who, as a web developer, filled in their feedback form with a message saying: “Not only is your customer service crap but your website is rubbish, unintuitive, impossible to navigate and badly designed. Get someone decent to re-do it for you, you fecktards.”