What is pissing you off this time?

[Carruthers]

I‘ve never been much of a fan of the Direct Debit system of paying recurring bills as it seems, despite guarantees, to be open season on one’s bank account. Consequently I always paid my ISP monthly bill by credit card.

The company was taken over a few years ago and a £1.99/month surcharge immediately imposed on anyone paying by card, so my bill increased from £15.31 to £17.30 per month.
At the time I did consider going over to Direct Debit but the ISP was an outfit notorious for bungling customer billing and were never out of the complaint columns in the financial pages of the national press.

Fast forward to last month. In an effort to get some sort of return on my money, I opened a Current (checking) Account that paid interest.
Among the conditions were a minimum of two Direct Debits and a fee of £2.00 per month. It sounded a reasonable deal so I took the bull by the horns and converted my ISP bill to a DD.
£2.00 fee minus £1.99 surcharge = net cost of £0.01 per month.

This morning an Email arrived from the ISP saying that my bill would be increased by £5.00 from December. As near as damn it by 33%!

And the moral of the story? You can’t win. You’re bloody fortunate if you break even.