I have been ill all this week. I have pretty much been laying in bed all week wondering if I was about to breathe my last breath. So when I woke up this morning the last thing I needed was to find that someone had kindly cleared out my bank account.

Well not entirely, the person had rather sportingly left me the princely sum of around £28.

There was no clue on my bank statement as to who had done this, just a loads of numbers. I contacted my bank and after about an hour was finally told that they did not know why this money had been taken and that it was not their problem.

Ill or not I was not going to let that stand, I got dressed and dragged my diseased body to my local branch. 15 minutes of bollocking later and the scared guy behind the desk quickly disappeared. When he returned he told me there was a system failure and that all they could tell was that the sum was withdrawn by a hotel that I book when I go to Manchester.

This was odd. I have never booked rooms directly with the hotel, I have always booked through an agent company. I went home and telephoned the hotel and spoke to a very helpful man called Duncan. He said there was no record of any payment from me since the last one on the 19 of November.

He asked me for the name of the agent company and said he would phone them and have a word.

He phoned me back an hour later and told me that the agent’s computer had had a system failure and had sent a payment request (I should point out they took three times the amount I normally pay) in error.

He told me that he had given them some rather choice words and that they would be refunding my money within the next couple of days. He kept apologising to me for the inconvenience. I pointed out that it was not him that needed to apologise to me.

I fired off an email to the agent company and told them in no uncertain terms how unhappy I was with them. Because they had taken this money I was not able to book a hotel to spend the weekend up in Manchester.

To make matters worse I just now checked my statement and I have been charged by my bank for going overdrawn. I had paid for something and agreed with the company to take the money on the 2nd. Because the agent company took the money there wasn’t enough to cover so I now have a £45 bank charge to sort out.

Bastards!

Before I end this I’d like to recommend a web site to anyone who is stuck for buying any women Christmas presents. www.facecream.net is a very informative site that tells you which face creams actually work the best.

Photo by Simone Soldà from FreeImages