It has been a long time since I’ve shared my feelings about corporate fecktitude. Too long, perhaps. What good fortune, then, that having recently left British Gas, they foolishly asked what I thought of their service.

So galling is their general level of competence that, even in this request for feedback, they managed to piss me off. Rather than only throw my valuable insights into what’s clearly a generic 3rd Party Consultancy Survey, to be ignored forever, I thought I’d share my response here, for all to see.

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Dear British Gas,

Thank you for inviting me to engage in your customer experience survey. I did put some comments in the form and filled out the scores, but had some extra notes. Through some act of oversight, there was a thousand character limit on the comments box and the scores for each area only went down to zero.

The optimism is admirable, but also wholly unwarranted. Especially so in the case of “how likely am I to recommend British Gas to my friends and family?”, where a zero apparently reflects me being “not at all likely” to recommend British Gas to my friends and family.

“Not at all likely” doesn’t even skim the surface at the uppermost boundary to the chthonic depths of my sentiments toward British Gas. Not only is it unlikely I would recommend you to anyone, I am actually certain to as widely and frequently as possible dissuade any people whatsoever from using your services.

I won’t bother to chart the literal years of dispute I had with you over self-evidently absurd energy bills. We can also ignore the infinite loop of emails from your complaints department, responding directly to my emails with “Since we haven’t heard from you, we assume you’re satisfied your problem has been resolved.”

Nor do I really have the energy to detail the leaving process itself, which was akin to emergency field surgery for testicular cancer; traumatic, but ultimately better than slowly turning into a single huge, ambulatory bollock and then dying. British Gas is the death by huge ambulatory bollockhood in this metaphor, in case that wasn’t clear.

Of further note, it is worth mentioning that one of the questions in your feedback survey was the most singularly ill-judged, passive-aggressive, patronising thing I’ve ever been asked. Specifically, the one where, on a scale of 1-5 (1 = strongly disagree, 5 = strongly agree), you asked whether I’d be willing to pay more money for better customer service.

Last year, British Gas posted record profits of £751,000,000, so how about we rephrase the question?

On the following scale, how willing would you be to make lower profits so you can provide acceptable standards of customer service?

1 – We are the publicy traded manifestation of Mammon, Demon Prince of greed and avarice

2 – We’d eat babies if it were profitable, but it isn’t and they taste funny

3 – *chortles into goblet of caviar sorbet*

4 – If it means we’ll remain a viable business in the long-term, maybe

5 – Our parasitic brain fungus has developed into a vestigial sense of shame, so yes

I’ve already had enough of your shit, that’s why I don’t want to be a customer any more. If you want more customers, you make less money. I don’t care what the amoral blob of pseudo-sentient foie gras you call investors thinks.

And that’s really the problem, isn’t it? You have two completely incompatible sets of customers; first, the ones to whom you’re delivering services; second, the ones to whom you’re trying to flog shares and pay dividends. The former want whatever it is delivered with a modicum of competence and at a fair price. The latter want to deliver whatever it is for the barest minimum cost in return for the maximum possible profit.

In any sane world we would call that what it is: a conflict of interests.

Imagine if I opened a cattery and asked my customers whether, since they’d been so upset by me exploding their beloved pets while they were in Cornwall for the week, they’d be willing to pay extra for that to not happen. Obviously I don’t want the cats to all pop during their stay with me, but my main investor is the Association For Cat-Bursting and I have a duty of care to their interests, too. Be reasonable, people – I have bills to pay twice. Either you’re willing to pay more money for me to not inflate your cat to 300psi and let my financial backers use it as a dartboard or you’re just greedy, selfish ingrates.

Anyway, the details and nuanced economic theory aside, you wanted to know my opinion of your company. So, here it is:

If I never have to deal with you incompetent, dishonest, greedy cretins again, it will still be a thousand years too soon. Every interaction seems to be with systems and processes deliberately designed to be frustrating and pointless. It would take a large, well-funded team of the world’s top talent, researching day and night for several decades, to design a service as poor and shamelessly hostile to its customers as that which British Gas has developed.

If your business were a vending machine, once money was put in, it would flash up “thanks :)” for a fraction of a second, before dispensing a live grenade and spraying the user with stagnant fox urine and aerosolised herpes. Just in case they survived the grenade.

Should there suddenly be an outbreak of Cosmic Justice, your company would fold tomorrow and the board of directors be imprisoned for fraud and the newly-established crime of Being Hateful Twats, and I would need to seek medical treatment for history’s most belligerent priapism.

I would rather spend every weekend for the rest of my life in a sewage-flooded basement, pushing ossified horse carcasses into my colon with an electrified riot baton, than ever return to being a British Gas customer.

Thank you for your time. Hopefully this feedback is useful to the rigorless pantomime that is your service review process. If you would like any further information or thoughts, please smear yourselves in quicklime and jump into a deep hole.

All the best,

Me