A View From Middle England - Conservative with a slight libertarian touch - For Christian charity and traditional belief - Free Enterprise NOT Covert Corporatism

Sunday, October 22, 2006

More water problems

This morning I woke up feeling quite a lot better. Made myself a cup of tea. All very good. Then I thought about shaving and shower. Hold on, what's with the water pressure. Very much a weak stream! Couldn't get any hot water as we have a combi condenser boiler. After a brief discussion with my wife about it, I went round to the neighbours. Same trouble. Came back to phone Severn Trent.

Now Severn Trent is much like any other utility company. Quick on the profit motive, but rather less keen on the service side of things. I spoke to an obliging young man who asked for my address and the nature of the problem. "The water pressure is down" "Oh!" he said, as if I was the only one to have the problem. Then he said it may take four hours to rectify. I got a job reference number and he said someone would call when things were put right. I then said my neighbour was having the same problem. He was not really offering much in the way of further information but suggested she rang in as well, as the job references would be different. I asked if he knew whether the whole road was affected. He appeared a bit vague but then said he'd had a call from a road nearby. Anyway, eventually he spilt the beans by admitting there were calls from all over the area and it was already being worked on!

Now if I hadn't persisted he might have left me with the idea that this was a localised matter affecting only my house! But to add to the interest, when the water came back to pressure it was TWICE as powerful as before, with a hint of mud in it!

This all goes to suggest that they have been living with a massive leak somewhere in the vicinity for at least four years (the time we've been in the house) because we've never had pressure like this. The boiler works a treat, the hot and cold taps don't compete anymore and we get water at twice the speed we did.

But Severn Trent!?! Can you be a little less evasive and a bit more persuasive in your approach to service matters?

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