One day, during our tenure of the local pub, I received a standard letter from a well‑known national supplier of electricity. As a result of my telephone call to them consequent upon that letter, I would respectfully suggest that they reword it so that falls in line with situations occurring in the real world. Something like this, perhaps:-

Dear Customer,

Thank you for changing – without even realising you had – to Business Electricity Plan Flexirate 2. You will see this change on your next bill from us.

As a Powermen (made up name) customer with a Business Electricity Plan contract, your prices will be fixed for the length of your contract and we are pleased to be able to give details of the Business Electricity Plan you believe you have chosen all by yourself without any help from us overleaf.

Remember, if you are a Tesco Clubcard holder and you have a mere 17 minutes 55 seconds to waste, please contact us at the number below to attempt to register your Clubcard with us as part of a promotion which, as you will soon discover, is only available to private residential customers. Please try and ensure that, before ringing, you have a telephone with a speaker button so that you can get on with some work while you wait the 15 minutes 43 seconds it takes to actually answer your call. With this scenario in mind, you will, of course, appreciate that our operative will thereby have actually dealt with your actual call very quickly indeed, actually.

Do remember this call will be free but it would be of great help to obviate delays for other customers with genuine account queries if you were to ring on a separate occasion just to thank us for not charging you for ringing us – this usually only takes 12 minutes 40 seconds or thereabouts. You would – if the Clubcard facility were available to you – earn 1 point for every £1 you spend on your energy. That’s 224 points a month you will discover you will have lost just by ringing us – free!

Yours faithfully,

Elaine ******

Customer Service (oxymoron)