Breaking News: Reality is crumbling

The Daily Absurdity

Unfiltered. Unverified. Unbelievable.

Home/EU

British Gas and the 15-Month Heist: A Eulogy for Human Patience

Buck Valor
Written by
Buck ValorPersiflating Non-Journalist
Sunday, January 18, 2026
Share this story
A hyper-realistic, dark satirical image of an elderly woman sitting in a freezing, dimly lit room by a cold radiator. She is holding a rotary telephone handset with cobwebs stretching from her hand to the wall. In the background, a giant, glowing blue British Gas logo looms like a malicious neon god, while stacks of golden coins are visible through a transparent wall just out of her reach. Cinematic lighting, gloomy atmosphere.

Fifteen months. In the time it took British Gas to return £1,500 to a woman who actually exists and ostensibly has bills to pay, the Earth completed more than one full rotation around the sun, several governments collapsed in fits of various idiocies, and the heat death of the universe drew ever closer. To the average person, £1,500 is a significant sum of money, perhaps the difference between a warm home and a damp misery. To British Gas, and its parent company Centrica—which recently reported profits that would make a Roman Emperor blush—it is a rounding error, a microscopic speck of dust on a balance sheet that they couldn't be bothered to flick away for over a year.

The case of Beth Kojder is not merely a story of corporate incompetence; it is a clinical study in the absolute decay of the British regulatory system. It is a testament to the fact that in the modern world, the individual is not a customer, but a minor inconvenience to be managed by automated delay tactics. The Energy Ombudsman, that most adorable of bureaucratic paperweights, actually ruled in Kojder’s favor nearly a year ago. Imagine that. A supposedly authoritative body tells a multibillion-pound conglomerate to give back money that doesn't belong to them, and the conglomerate responds with the corporate equivalent of a slow, rhythmic blink. For eleven months after the ruling, British Gas simply sat on the money, presumably hoping the claimant would eventually succumb to old age or a sudden, convenient bout of amnesia.

This is the dark comedy of privatization. We were promised efficiency, competition, and the sleek dynamism of the market. Instead, we got the East India Company rebranded with a blue flame logo and a customer service line that exists solely to test the structural integrity of the human psyche. The delay wasn't a glitch; it was a strategy. Every day that £1,500 sat in a British Gas account instead of Beth Kojder’s was a day it was earning interest for people who already have more money than they could spend in ten lifetimes. It is a slow-motion heist, performed with the dull, gray efficiency of a spreadsheet.

When the company finally deigned to cough up the refund—only after the media started poking around, naturally—they likely blamed a 'technical error' or a 'system migration.' These are the modern prayers we offer to the gods of late-stage capitalism. 'The system' is the ultimate scapegoat. It is a sentient, malicious entity that only ever malfunctions in favor of the corporation. You will never see a 'technical error' that accidentally refunds every customer in the UK an extra thousand pounds. The glitches are remarkably one-directional. They are the digital manifestation of a corporate culture that views the public as a resource to be mined, rather than a community to be served.

The political class, of course, is useless in this equation. On one side, you have the performative outrage of the Left, who will write a sternly worded letter and then go back to arguing about semantics. On the other, the Right will mumble something about 'market forces' while ignoring the fact that there is no market when the consumer is held hostage by a utility monopoly. They are both complicit in the creation of a society where a giant can ignore a law for fifteen months with zero consequence, while a citizen who misses a single payment would have their credit score incinerated within weeks.

Kojder described the process as 'frustrating.' That is a triumph of British understatement. It is a psychological war of attrition. The goal is to make the process of reclaiming what is yours so agonizing, so labyrinthine, and so soul-crushingly slow that you eventually just give up. It is the democratization of despair. We are living in a reality where the ombudsman has the teeth of a gummy bear and the corporations have the conscience of a shark. British Gas didn't just take fifteen months to refund a debt; they stole fifteen months of a person's peace of mind, and they did it because they knew they could. In the end, the check arrived, but the dignity of the system remains lost in the mail, likely stuck in a 'technical error' that will never be fixed.

This story is an interpreted work of social commentary based on real events. Source: BBC News

Distribute the Absurdity

Enjoying the Apocalypse?

Journalism is dead, but our server costs are very much alive. Throw a coin to your local cynic to keep the lights on while we watch the world burn.

Tax Deductible? Probably Not.

Comments (0)

Loading comments...