In the past month, the following Direct debit payments have been taken from my bank account:

23 March 2011 BT Group plc 83.71
04 April 2011 BT Group plc 222.64
18 April 2011 BT Group plc 192.19
21 April 2011 BT Group plc 93.05
22 April 2011 BT Group plc 86.05

Total £677.64

I genuinely have no idea why. I only have one address and one broadband phone line, which includes one of those BT internet hub phones to make international calls cheaper. We do make some international calls, and before I moved here last summer our BT bill was around £60 per month.

One of the reasons why I have no idea what these multiple charges relate to, is that I have not received a single bill since I moved here last July. I have three times contacted BT about this. The last time we discovered that, when I moved here, BT had started sending the bills to an old address at which I lived many years ago – for no possible reason. Not to my last address, to which BT sent my phone bills while I lived there, and on which I have redirected mail. The BT operative who told me this said that they would send me copies of all the missing bills, and he nobly added they would waive the charge for duplicate bills. In fact I have received nothing since – not the missing nor current bills.

In December the BT line was cut off for three weeks. BT told me it was for unpaid bills. I told them that the bill was paid by direct debit and no payment had been missed. But that I could not understand at all the huge bills I was getting. They said they would write. They have not.

There is no worse organisation than BT for multiple recorded menus leading to eventual transfer to an under-trained operative six thousand miles away who has no relevant response permissible to somebody who claims they have been wrongly billed.

Today a buzz through seven automated menus eventually tells me that the BT billing department is closed for the Bank Holdiay, which is peculiar as I am pretty sure Good Friday is not a holiday in the country where it is situated.

Altogether BT have taken £2,950 out of my account in five months without giving me a single bill. I still have absolutely no idea why. Apparently they are open tomorrow. I will tell you what they say then.

You might well not be able to comment at the moment. In switching to the new blog platform, importing the 57,700 legitimate old comments into Intense Debate proved – and still is – a very difficult thing to do. While it is going on, we have had to activate comment moderation on the whole site, which has been frustrating for everyone.

Tim has been working on a fix with Intense Debate to solve the problems with loading the old comments. One problem this is causing is that I can’t get in to approve comments, which quite probably means you can’t make any at the moment. This may not apply to those who had sufficient moderated comments approved under Intense Debate to convince Intense Debate they should be trusted. This is an automatic feature, and explains why some people’s comments were able to appear straight away and others were waiting hours to be moderated. I understand the aggrieved comments this occasioned, but it wasn’t me, it was the software (Honest!).

Hopefully, after Easter these problems will all be behind us. I wanted to close with “Happy Good Friday”, but that really doesn’t sound right.