Christmas letter from E.ON

My Dad died this year and my brother has been sorting out his finances. Scottish Widows sent him a cheque made out to "Mr XYZ (deceased). Sigh.

Slightly off topic but the first time that my Daughter and I visited my Mums grave after the headstone had been replaced we discovered that they had engraved with my Mum's details and then installed someone else's headstone!

This was nearly 6 years ago but I will never forget the conversation with the lady from the engravers when I rang to say what had happened:

Me: This is Mrs. W's daughter. I've just been to visit my Mum's grave and you have put the wrong headstone back.

Lady: (After a lengthy shocked silence) You're joking!!

Me: No, I'm sorry but I'm serious. Although I felt like saying to her "what kind of sick sense of humour do you think I have!"

Lady: OMG I'm so sorry, we'll sort it out straight away.

To their credit they did sort it straight away and to be fair it was an incredible coincidence that they happened to have two gravestones in for engraving with the same surname at the same time. I sometimes think of that poor woman on the other end of the phone though and how shocked she must have been.

10 years after my MiL died we were still receiving junk mail addressed to her.

Glammanana wish I could say your experience of government departments no longer happened. In the last few months of his life my DH was in receipt of Disability Living Allowance. A few days before the funeral I received a letter stating they had overpaid him by £27. I have no problem with repaying an overpayment, but I would have thought they could have left it for a couple of weeks so I could sort things out.

After my father died, every time I visited his house I received phone calls from a company who thought he had not made his monthly payment to them. This in spite of the fact that our solicitor had written and told the company that my father had died, the bank accounts were frozen and payment would be made in due course.

The person who phoned was aggressive and persistent. He obviously did not believe that my father had died, thinking I was making excuses to avoid paying up.

Eventually, I wrote a letter of complaint and received an apology and a small amount of compensation.

This was six years ago. It was infuriating and upsetting and I have not forgotten it. I have, however, forgotten which company it was!

when my son died I wrote to his bank with details and got a letter in reply correctly addressed to me but with my name in the header and marked deceased. I was furious! Needless to say the bank grovelled when I pointed out the error but it shouldn't have happened and a bunch of flowers didn't help.

Facebook page and Twitter would be favourite to expose them and get an apology,this takes me back to when FIL died and before the funeral OH had a letter from pensions people to say they had overpaid him by 4 days as he died just as they had paid his pension,this was many years ago and I thought this kind of thing would not happen now.

Yes! Go for it, Kiora! Show the *** up. I know it was probably a computer generated letter but surely someone, somewhere, monitors their mailing list? On second thoughts, probably not!

Putting your excellently worded response on Eon's Facebook page should bring a rapid response.

I'd be tempted to write to one of those complaints pages in the newspapers; it's amazing how the tone of companies change with a bit of bad publicity. I think The Independent still do one [and The Telegraph]. They sort it all out for you as well as getting an apology.

Sorry for your loss, Kiora, but I did love the bit about resuscitation. Sort of thing I would have written.

Ouch.
Its like those companies (inter flora is prime example) that send you emails to remind you of mother's day, father's day, valentine's day etc. There must be lots of people who don't want to be reminded.