Squaring the circle...

Right, so sometime early March we get an overdue notice from them for an electricity bill we haven't received. I shrug a bit 'cos I'm used to the Cambridge post being naff and phone them up. They take payment details (switch), and agree to send me a new copy of the bill for my records.
About a week later we've recieved both copies of the bill, and Matthew has written 'jda paid by phone/switch 7/3/03' on one of them. All seems fine.
Yesterday, we get a letter (sent to `Jm Messrs Woodford'!) from a debt collections agency, and after a bit of furtling with HSBC's telephone service I discover that CGE haven't ever taken the original 127.85 out of my account, and they haven't contacted me to tell me that my Switch card hasn't worked or anything. Reluctantly I paid the debt collections people, and extracted a reference number from them to contact CGE with to complain.

Well, restoring the old database file and importing the (few) changes from the intervening 8 days seems to have been a reasonable solution, and I've written a new procedures document to try and avoid doing any of the things that we could think of that might have caused the problem.
Thank $deity for backups, eh.
Rest of the day's been quite unproductive, and interrupted by my co-worker getting me to help her move stuff. Still, I've got another hour to show something useful!