Nothing to worry about

Dear Disneyrollergirl,
In our drive to fleece you even further, provide excellent customer service, we are reviewing all our customer accounts for accurate gas meter readings. In doing so, we have noticed that there has not been a reading obtained from the gas meter at your property for some time. So it would be greatly appreciated if you could read your meter and complete and return the enclosed card to us.
Yours,
London Energy

Little did I realise in doing so that I would find a newly revised bill plonked on my desk four days later. These people want their money and fast, and what’s this – EEK! – £247! £70 more than the last quarter and this is for the gas used during the summer when we didn’t even have the heating on (apart from the last week – yep, autumn’s here already in the DRG house). I’m not one of those people who dreads the arrival of their bills as money is one of the areas where I’m generally quite anal and organised, so I have a (usually accurate) budget all worked out and the funds sit patiently in their allocated ‘pots’ in my bank account awaiting their turn to be duly paid.

In fact, when I worked on a magazine, I actually secretly enjoyed processing the invoices and updating the spreadsheets. It gave me a quiet ten minutes to don my ‘Do Not Disturb’ hat*, get stuck into the figures and make sure everything tallied up, and I always got that satisfied feeling of everything being up to date and nicely balanced. The arrival of the Bill From Hell did throw me temporarily but as usual, I did some juggling and worked out that if I delayed the payment of another bill and borrowed some money from that ‘pot’, then things could easily right themselves. Looking out of the window and seeing D getting the breakfast ready in our sunny courtyard, I decided anyway that this bill brouhaha wasn’t going to spoil my day. As my mantra banner says so succinctly…Worry About It Later. So I’m doing exactly that.

*What’s a ‘Do Not Disturb’ hat? It’s a paper hat with Do Not Disturb scrawled on it with magic marker so people know not to bother me while I’m in concentration mode. Alas, my colleagues did not take it very seriously. Can’t think why.