A gas bill by post paid at the bank, just like the 1970s
Back in the 1970s, paying the gas bill used to be quite a time-consuming process. A guy would call round and read your meter. A few days later, you got a bill in the post. After you had received your final reminder, you would go into town to the gas board showroom and pay over the counter.
There haven’t been any gas board showrooms for decades now. There used to be one on every major high street. They sold cookers and gas fires. That was a lifetime ago, and they all disappeared around the time of privatisation of British Gas in 1986. But by that time you were able to go to the bank to pay your gas bill. There may be a few younger readers who have never heard of banks. There used to be one of them on every high street.
Now it’s all much quicker and simpler. I upload a meter reading on the Scottish Gas website and pay online. I don’t even get a paper gas bill anymore. It comes by e-mail. Or it used to, until Virgin Media closed my email account a year ago. Scottish Gas, meanwhile, were still insisting that I used my old email address to log into my account.
So I clicked onto the personal details section of my account in order to change my email contact. There was no facility to do this. I was able to edit my postal address without any question. Which is bizarre, given that is where the gas is actually delivered. But I could not change my email. So this is where they kept sending me my bills. Which meant quite a bit of guesswork on my part, attempting to calculate when three months had elapsed since my last payment.
During the month of August, I was very busy so I must have forgotten. Until a bill from Scottish Gas dropped through the letterbox this week, together with a snooty letter asking why I hadn’t been responding to my emails. As I was on my way into town, I paid the bill at the bank. Half an hour after I got home, a guy came to the front door to read the gas meter. It was like being back in the seventies.