The owner of a hair salon was shocked to find a letter from the National Grid offering him a sum he believes could have powered all the houses in the county he lives in for a month.
Honest Lincolnshire businessman James Parker received a letter from the energy company that said it owed him £12.4million over their ‘failure to restore’ power to the business within 12 hours following a power outage.
Using average domestic costs, the roughly 160,000 houses in Lincolnshire and the mean amount of electricity a house uses in a day, James did some rough sums for Metro and estimated the massive total the National Grid offered him could power homes in the country for a little over 31 days.
When James first received the mistaken repayment he had only fleeting dreams of a luxury lifestyle for him and his wife Natasha before he quickly realised there was some kind of error.
He told Metro he next started to wonder how far the situation would go, and found himself asking ‘how would the system cope’ with such a sudden influx of money if he were to cash a cheque.
Then, he said he pondered how much he could generate on the interest while the sum sat in the bank before National Grid realised its mistake and asked for the original total to be returned.
James, 54, runs the Asembo hairdressers in Stamford with his wife Natasha, 44. He has lived in the quaint Midlands town for more than 25 years, and Natasha for more than 30.
He said their regular clients have noticed the publicity and have been sharing a laugh over what occurred.
But James also said he was only ‘aware from neighbours’ there ever was a power cut in the area and said he did not notice on the day.
The sum he was eventually offered was ground down to a comparatively meagre £95, but James said that had his business been open on the day then the compensation he would have been due was likely to be ‘much, much higher’.
National Grid apologised and put the mistake down to an ‘admin error’, the Mail reported.
James also joked to the BBC that the National Grid must have mistaken his business, the Asembo hairdressers in Stamford, for ‘Terminal Two at Heathrow Airport’.
He said: ‘They said on the letter that the problem wasn’t rectified in 12 hours – but I don’t think we were open that day anyway.’
The business owner said he considered where he might bank the full sum to see what sort of interest he could get on it, while an ‘around the world’ trip for his family would have been high on his list of priorities.
Mr Parker, who has run the business with his wife Natasha since 2013, said the huge cash total would have brought him and his family a ‘life of anonymity’ but there was a disappointment when the corrected amount came.
He said: ‘If I presented it to the local bank at the till, they would’ve said that wasn’t right. But if I did it at the machine they would just process it without any human interaction.
‘If I could have kept it I would have probably disappeared very quickly to get away.’
He insisted he was ‘still grateful’ for the cash he eventually received, but ‘not as grateful as he would have been’.
A National Grid spokesperson said: ‘While we’re not in the business of handing out jackpots, we are in the business of keeping the lights on – so the customer was promptly sent a follow-up letter confirming the correct payment figure.
‘We’d like to thank them for their understanding, and will be reviewing our processes to prevent this situation reoccurring.’
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