Shut-out.
Several times on SL this shutting people out has been belittled by people. That`s why I`m putting this story here. It`s a true one.
For years, Pat did everything right.
The 84-year-old grandmother paid her energy bills the same way she always had — in person, at the Post Office, on time, every time. No missed payments. She understood her responsibilities.
Then British Gas went paperless.Everything moved online — to a world Pat couldn't access, because she doesn't have the internet.
She told them. She called British Gas and explained that she had no way to pay online. She asked — repeatedly — for paper bills to be sent to her home. She was promised, again and again, that it would be sorted.It never was.
Without paper bills Pat couldn't pay. And without payment, the debt began to climb. Not because she refused to pay, but because no one gave her a way to.
And then the letters came. Not the paper bills she had been begging for. Solicitors' letters. Warnings about penalties. Threatening language delivered to the door of a grandmother whose only offence was not having Wi-Fi.
Pat described the experience in two words: sleepless nights.
This is what digital exclusion looks like. It doesn't announce itself with drama. It creeps in quietly — a system update here, a policy change there — and suddenly millions of elderly people, people with disabilities, people in rural areas without reliable broadband, find themselves locked out of basic services they've used their entire lives. The Office for National Statistics estimates that over two million adults in the UK have never used the internet. They didn't choose to be left behind. The system chose to leave them.
Pat's story only changed because it reached the media. ITV News Meridian covered her case, and suddenly British Gas found the solution that had apparently been impossible for months: they apologized, promised to provide her with paper bills going forward, and offered a goodwill gesture to resolve the issue.
The company stated that most of its millions of customers prefer paperless billing. But Pat had been asking for exactly that, and no one listened until a camera showed up.
That's the part of this story that should keep all of us awake at night. Not just that it happened to Pat . But that it's happening right now to thousands of people just like her — people too proud or too exhausted or too afraid to call a news station. People who are being quietly crushed by systems that were never designed with them in mind.
It took a news crew to remind a billion-pound corporation that an 84-year-old woman deserved a piece of paper in her letterbox — that's not a customer service failure.That's a moral one.
They cut my Parent`s out in a similar way when paper reciepts for your shopping were stopped Mum had no way to check her delivered order was correct. De-skilling people and blocking them out of the system.
For years, Pat did everything right.
The 84-year-old grandmother paid her energy bills the same way she always had — in person, at the Post Office, on time, every time. No missed payments. She understood her responsibilities.
Then British Gas went paperless.Everything moved online — to a world Pat couldn't access, because she doesn't have the internet.
She told them. She called British Gas and explained that she had no way to pay online. She asked — repeatedly — for paper bills to be sent to her home. She was promised, again and again, that it would be sorted.It never was.
Without paper bills Pat couldn't pay. And without payment, the debt began to climb. Not because she refused to pay, but because no one gave her a way to.
And then the letters came. Not the paper bills she had been begging for. Solicitors' letters. Warnings about penalties. Threatening language delivered to the door of a grandmother whose only offence was not having Wi-Fi.
Pat described the experience in two words: sleepless nights.
This is what digital exclusion looks like. It doesn't announce itself with drama. It creeps in quietly — a system update here, a policy change there — and suddenly millions of elderly people, people with disabilities, people in rural areas without reliable broadband, find themselves locked out of basic services they've used their entire lives. The Office for National Statistics estimates that over two million adults in the UK have never used the internet. They didn't choose to be left behind. The system chose to leave them.
Pat's story only changed because it reached the media. ITV News Meridian covered her case, and suddenly British Gas found the solution that had apparently been impossible for months: they apologized, promised to provide her with paper bills going forward, and offered a goodwill gesture to resolve the issue.
The company stated that most of its millions of customers prefer paperless billing. But Pat had been asking for exactly that, and no one listened until a camera showed up.
That's the part of this story that should keep all of us awake at night. Not just that it happened to Pat . But that it's happening right now to thousands of people just like her — people too proud or too exhausted or too afraid to call a news station. People who are being quietly crushed by systems that were never designed with them in mind.
It took a news crew to remind a billion-pound corporation that an 84-year-old woman deserved a piece of paper in her letterbox — that's not a customer service failure.That's a moral one.
They cut my Parent`s out in a similar way when paper reciepts for your shopping were stopped Mum had no way to check her delivered order was correct. De-skilling people and blocking them out of the system.
