Indeed they did; and a story from the days when banks had local managers who could approve a house loan, and clerks who know their business: four or five years after moving house I ran into a bit of financial tightening-up, and went into the bank to talk to them about setting up a budget account that would receive an automatic transfer every month, and from which all my direct debits would be fed.
This is my What the Eye Doesn't See the Heart Doesn't Grieve Over financial management method: if your normal bank account contains only €100, that's what you consider you have, even though you actually know another €100 has automatically gone into a different account to pay the direct debits. By the same token, when I used to have to get to work on time, I set all the clocks in the house 15 minutes fast; the emotions being a simple soul, this meant I shot out of the house in good time. (Warning: it has to be *all* the clocks.)
Anyway, I was setting all this up with the helpful bank clerk, and he said "That's odd, you're paying two separate direct debits to the elctricity board."
"That can't be," I said. He asked me was I renting out a property, perhaps, and when I picked myself up off the floor and dried my tears of laughter, I asked him to tell me more of these two direct debits.
One, he said, was for my current address, the other for - and he listed the place I'd moved from.
I told him that this second one had been cancelled when I moved, along with all the other direct debits relating to the former home, and something must have gone wrong, and I asked him to re-cancel it.
When I was going, he told me I'd better call the electricity board too, which I did when I got home. I had a bit of trouble convincing them, but they said they'd investigate and look into it.
They rang back in a couple of days and said grimly that the person now living there had been getting free electricity for all these years, for which I'd been paying, and he was now in big, big trouble, and they'd repay me all the money I'd paid over the years.
I wonder how many people are now unknowingly paying double direct debits, not realising that the direct debit that triggers every month is actually two bi-monthly direct debits. I'd still be paying were it not for that helpful bank clerk, whose name I bless.