Ref BDW/OPEN/001Open
The self-checkout
Accused me of removing an item from the bagging area. The item was a cucumber. The cucumber was, and remains, in the bagging area.
WillsWay Collective Ltd · Publisher of record
File ref 1047-2026-1221
Sheet 01 of 12
Complainant
Big Dopey
Big Dopey
Will
Professional Escalator since 1996
I am the author of I'll Be Escalating This — thirty years told through the things that went wrong and what I did about them. Banks, airlines, a games console manufacturer, a pizza place and a man from a telecoms retentions team called Tavish.
I'm aiming to publish it on or before 21 December 2026, which is also my thirtieth birthday, because I have never once made a deadline easy for myself.
Target publication date
ON OR BEFORE 21.12.2026
A target, not a promise. I've read enough about delivery estimates.
—
Days
—
Hours
—
Mins
—
Secs
WillsWay Collective Ltd
I'll Be
Escalating
This
Escalating
This
One Star, Would Not Recommend
(Would Do Again)
Will Young
writing as BigDopeyWill
writing as BigDopeyWill
ISBN 978-1-0369-9542-3 · REF 1047-2026-1221
JACKET ARTWORK PENDING · CARICATURE BY SASSYSTEVE
Form BDW/02 · Case log
Compiled by the complainant
Sheet 02 of 12
Current escalations
A running list. The top half is live and unresolved. The bottom half is in the book, with reference numbers, because I keep everything.
Open · no reply received
Ref BDW/OPEN/002Open
Hotel Wi-Fi
Required a room number, a surname, a booking reference, an email address and what I can only describe as a blood sample. Then disconnected at the pool.
Ref BDW/OPEN/003Open
The parking machine
Exact change only. No card. No app. No change machine. A sign reading "SORRY FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE" that has clearly been there since 2011.
Ref BDW/OPEN/004Open
The printer
Offline. Thirteen years in IT and I still cannot tell you why. It is on the network. I can ping it. It knows what it did.
Ref BDW/OPEN/005Awaiting reply
easyJet
July 2019. A complaint so long the online form's character limit forced me to submit it in instalments. Compensation denied. No response ever received. Still, technically, waiting.
Ref BDW/OPEN/006Open
Live chat
"Thanks for your patience, I'm just checking that for you." Ninety minutes. I have been checked for longer than some of my relationships lasted.
Closed · full account in the book
Ref 28471887Resolved
EE · July 2026
They'd sent my legally required end-of-contract notification by text message. To a data-only SIM. Living in a dongle. In the glovebox of a car. Ninety minutes of live chat got nowhere; three emails to Executive Complaints got everything.
Ref LOV12995137USettled
loveholidays · Majorca 2026
Opening offer £11.75, being five per cent of the accommodation cost. Closing position £250, unconditional, no minimum spend. Roughly twenty-one times the first number, which is the entire argument of this book in one line.
FOS ref 1946-2909Two years
The cross-bank fraud saga
Three banks, one Financial Ombudsman investigator, and a case reference I can still recite faster than my own bank details. 2017. Chapter 6.
Ref 45727467Refund won
PlayStation Plus · 2025
Auto-renewal. Initially refused. Overturned via a live chat conducted, for reasons that made sense at the time, from a recovery holiday in Bulgaria.
Ref 41089174Absurd
Clearpay · June 2025
Day three of an unresolved complaint, they sent a customer satisfaction survey at one o'clock in the morning. "Would you give Clearpay a Thumbs Up for Service?" Reader, I would not.
No reference issuedUnresolved
North Holland Young Farmers · 2023
A duck's head, at a Dinner Dance. I resigned by email on 3 November 2023, was refused a refund the same evening, and escalated to the national federation eight months later. I have no defence for the eight months.
Form BDW/03 · Publication particulars
Paperback · ISBN 978-1-0369-9542-3
Sheet 03 of 12
Not yet published
I'll Be Escalating This
One Star, Would Not Recommend (Would Do Again)
Will Young has been robbed in Ibiza, poisoned by a rock in the same week, socially engineered on X in thirty-five minutes flat, and put through five hours of surgery he didn't tell most people about until it was over. He has also, on separate occasions, escalated a holiday complaint to a CEO's office, argued a telecoms retentions agent called Tavish into submission over a SIM card living in a dongle in the car, and spent two years untangling a cross-bank fraud case with an actual Financial Ombudsman investigator, whose name he can still recite faster than his own bank details.
This is not a misery memoir. This is not a business book. This is thirty years of one bloke from Hampshire-turned-Lincolnshire refusing to accept the first answer anyone gives him, told the way he'd actually tell it — down the pub, no filter, every complaint reference number present and correct. Somewhere between the stonefish and the Financial Ombudsman, a life happened. This is that life, itemised, timestamped, and, where necessary, escalated.
One star. Would not recommend. Would absolutely do again.
ISBN · Paperback
978-1-0369-9542-3
Distribution is through IngramSpark, which means any bookshop or library in the UK and Ireland can order it in — you just have to give them this number. Quote it at the counter, or on the phone, or in an email, and it does the rest.
49,560
Words
23
Chapters
3
Interludes
1
Duck's head
1
Stonefish
1
Monkey onesie
Part One
Before it all went wrong
Born four days before Christmas. A house that isn't there any more. School, or: how I learned to argue with authority early. The apprenticeship.
Part Two
Learning to complain
Ibiza goes wrong (twice). The cross-bank fraud saga. The day job. Building something from nothing. The Christmas lights that took over a street. The move to Wrangle.
Part Three
The last few years
The holiday disasters. Standing my ground. The diagnosis. Surgery and recovery. How I got social engineered in thirty-five minutes. England v Mexico at two in the morning. Turning thirty.
Written by Will Young, writing as BigDopeyWill. Published by WillsWay Collective Ltd. Paperback, 5.25 × 8 inches. Not enrolled in KDP Select, because exclusivity would block the direct sale and I've read the terms.
Form BDW/04 · Sample material
Extract released by the author
Sheet 04 of 12
Read a chapter
The opening of Chapter One, unedited. If you can hear a bloke in a pub telling you a story that is slightly longer than he thinks it is, that's the correct reading experience.
Uncorrected proof
Chapter One
Born Four Days Before ChristmasRight, let's start where everyone has to start, apparently — the day I turned up. 21 December 1996, Frimley Park Hospital. A Saturday, for reasons I genuinely cannot explain the relevance of, but I looked it up and it felt important enough to include, so here we are. Four days before Christmas, not two — I can't even get my own outline right, which if you've read any of the rest of this book will not surprise you in the slightest.
Now — before we start properly, one thing.
This opens like a diary. Born on this date, in this place, to these people. I'm aware of that. I read it back and thought, hang on, this is going to give entirely the wrong impression, because a diary suggests something orderly and daily and reflective, kept in a nice notebook by somebody with a fountain pen and a sense of routine.
This is not that.
This is a man reconstructing thirty years from a filing cabinet, an email archive and a folder of photographs he'd forgotten existed, mostly in the evenings, occasionally in Apple Notes on a sofa.
There will be no entries. There will be no dates at the top of pages. There is one date, it's the day I turned up, and after that it's whatever order the stories make the most sense in.
Right. Now we can start.
Being born that close to Christmas does exactly what you'd think it does to a birthday. It gets absorbed. Swallowed whole by the bigger event three sentences later on the calendar. You get the combined present, the "well it's basically the same thing" card, the birthday cake that's suspiciously got a bit of tinsel involved in the decoration. I've made my peace with it. Mostly.
— 3 —
Form BDW/05 · Personnel record
Completed by the subject
Sheet 05 of 12
Meet Big Dopey Will
The name on the front is BigDopeyWill. It's been my handle online for the better part of a decade, and frankly it describes the contents more accurately than my actual name does. Will Young is the bloke who writes the complaint letters. BigDopeyWill is the one who stands on the fish.
Name
Will Young — writing as BigDopeyWill
Birth year
1996. Four days before Christmas, which explains the combined presents and possibly the rest of it.
Occupation
Senior IT Engineer. Started on a helpdesk at sixteen. Thirteen years later, still on a helpdesk, but a much better one.
Side of the desk
Runs WillsWay Collective Ltd, which publishes this book, and trades as Zenlabra — WordPress care plans for people who've stopped loving their website. UK based, UK hosted.
Location
Wrangle, Lincolnshire. The flattest, windiest part of it. A static caravan on the family plot, which sounds worse than it is and is actually rather good.
Livestock
Poultry. Cats. Neither has raised a formal complaint, though the cats have been non-verbally scathing.
Known for
Not letting things go. Not in a shouting-at-a-checkout-girl way — in a written way. A folder, a reference number, a timestamped photo, and an email address I've had to dig out because they've hidden it.
Longest hold
Longer than some relationships last. I have the call log.
Drinks
Hawkstone. If you're getting a round in.
Words of wisdom
Age 16, in a school leavers' book: "You can only try your best, not anyone else's." I've had thirty years and fifty thousand words to improve on it and I don't think I have.
Correspondence
escalate@bigdopeywill.uk · Response within twenty-eight days. Probably.
Form BDW/06 · Charitable donations
No funds handled by this website
Sheet 06 of 12
Two charities
There's a chapter in the book called "Giving Something Back", and these are the two it's about. Both buttons go straight to the charity's own donation page. No money comes anywhere near me, I don't take a cut, and I'm not running a total — I'd just rather the links were here than not.
April 2024 · completed£255 raised
The Lullaby Trust
Mum and I ran the Boston UK 5K Fun Run in April 2024 for The Lullaby Trust. It chucked it down from fairly early on and we were wet through, and it was one of the best days I've had. £255, all of it to them. The Angel Inn in Wrangle ran their own collection off their own backs, without being asked, which I've never forgotten.
There is a photograph somewhere of a grown man in a monkey onesie in a Lincolnshire pub an hour after that run. I don't have a defence for the onesie and I don't want one.
The Lullaby Trust supports families bereaved by sudden infant death and works on safer sleep for babies.
Donate to The Lullaby TrustApril 2026 · did not happenTotal: nothing
Cancer Research UK
We signed up to do it again in April 2026, this time for Cancer Research UK. Page up, people putting money in, the lot. And then I didn't run it — cold and flu, on the wrong week, the least interesting way a person can be ill.
So the total on that one stands at nothing, and I'm not going to dress that up. There's still time. In the meantime the button below skips me out entirely and goes straight to them, which is arguably the better arrangement anyway.
Cancer Research UK funds research into the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancer.
Donate to Cancer Research UK
Form BDW/07 · Schedule of exhibits
Originals retained
Sheet 07 of 12
Evidence locker
The book is reconstructed rather than remembered — emails, complaint references, letters, timestamps and a Facebook data export going back fourteen years. The originals live in an archive marked DO NOT PUBLISH. These are the descriptions.
One (1) 4G dongle. Recovered from a glovebox. Contains a data-only SIM which, on 6 July 2026 at 22:43, silently received the legally required notification that my contract was ending.
Opening settlement offer of £11.75. Being five per cent of £235.02. Declined, in writing, at some length.
Customer satisfaction survey. Sent at one o'clock in the morning, on day three of an unresolved complaint, by the company causing it.
One (1) duck's head. North Holland Young Farmers Dinner Dance, 28 October 2023. Thrower redacted, and staying that way.
Financial Ombudsman Service case file 1946-2909. Three banks. Two years. One investigator, whose name I have never forgotten and am not putting on a website.
One (1) rock, Ibiza, later identified as a fish. The week also featured a stolen wallet. It was not, on balance, a successful week.
Travel voucher, £250, unconditional, no minimum spend, expires 29 June 2027. The final position in a negotiation that opened at Exhibit B.
TripAdvisor profile willyoung2112. Twenty-nine reviews, thirty-one contributions, nine helpful votes. Charting one hotel's decline from "Value for Money" to "A once-great hotel that has seen better days" across three visits.
Fourteen years of my own Facebook posts, downloaded and read back in order. Relentlessly cheerful. Corrected me repeatedly. Left almost everything out — which is the honest reason the book exists.
Photographs, draft pages and assorted exhibits to be added here as the print files are finalised.
Form BDW/08 · Status indicator
Calibrated annually. Never re-zeroed.
Sheet 08 of 12
The escalation meter
Seven positions. Have a go if you like — it always comes back to the same one.
Needle currently at position seven. It has been there since roughly 2016.
Form BDW/09 · The league table
A wholly subjective ranking, compiled by the complainant
Sheet 09 of 12
The league table
Every opponent, ranked on the only statistics that have ever mattered to me. The full deck — including the Top Trumps cards, because by that point I was enjoying myself — is in the back of the book.
| Award | Opponent | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Best result | loveholidays · Majorca 2026 | £11.75 to £250. Roughly twenty-one times the opening offer, achieved by getting past customer services and then asking for the settlement in a form that was actually usable. |
| Most satisfying | EE · July 2026 | Ninety minutes of live chat produced nothing. Three emails to Executive Complaints produced everything. |
| Fastest | Three · February 2024 | Logged and resolved inside a day. I have never fully recovered. |
| Most money, one go | The Pizza Shed, Old Leake | Full refund on an £82 order, offered unprompted by a man who then invited me to pop in after my surgery, while I was busy going over his head to Mastercard. |
| Most absurd response | Clearpay · June 2025 | A customer satisfaction survey, sent at one in the morning, three days into an unresolved complaint. |
| Most effort, least reward | easyJet · 2019 | A complaint so long it had to be submitted across multiple forms because the box had a character limit. Compensation denied. No response ever received. |
| Most unusual subject | North Holland Young Farmers · 2023 | A deceased duck's head. No further nominations were received. |
| Longest gap | Also Young Farmers | Resigned 3 November 2023. Forwarded the entire chain to the national federation on 5 July 2024. Eight months. I have no defence. |
| Cleanest defeat | On the Beach · 2024 | The longest complaint I have ever written, itemised across a dozen headings, answered warmly and comprehensively and then declined in a single sentence. I let it go. I'm told that's growth. |
| Best service received | A bar in San Antonio · 2015 | Took an unconscious eighteen-year-old behind the bar, kept him hydrated, and let him wake up in his own time. The best customer service I have ever received. I never got their names and I've thought about them for eleven years. |
Form BDW/10 · Reader feedback
Queue status: empty
Sheet 10 of 12
Reviews
There aren't any yet. The book isn't out. In the interests of the transparency I've spent two hundred pages demanding from other people, here is the ticket queue exactly as it stands — one genuine entry, and three I've raised speculatively on my own behalf.
Ticket #001Verified
"One star. Would not recommend. Would absolutely do again."
— BigDopeyWill, reviewing his own book
Ticket #002Aspirational
"Couldn't put it down."
— Raised by the author. Awaiting a real human being.
Ticket #003Aspirational
"Made me laugh and cringe in equal measure."
— Also raised by the author. Shamelessly.
Ticket #004Aspirational
"Needs escalating immediately."
— The one I actually want.
Read it when it's out and you'd like to replace one of these with something real? escalate@bigdopeywill.uk. Bad ones accepted. I'd be a hypocrite otherwise.
Form BDW/11 · Frequently raised queries
Answered without a ticket number, for once
Sheet 11 of 12
Questions people actually ask
Answered here so nobody has to email me, though you're very welcome to email me.
When is I'll Be Escalating This out?
I'm aiming to publish it on or before 21 December 2026, which is my thirtieth birthday. The countdown at the top of this page is the honest version of that: a target, not a promise. The manuscript is finished — roughly 49,560 words, twenty-three chapters and three interludes — so what's left is production rather than writing.
Where can I buy it?
Paperback through Amazon, and an ebook edition through Apple Books. It's also distributed through IngramSpark, which means any bookshop or library in the UK and Ireland can order a copy in if you give them the ISBN: 978-1-0369-9542-3. Buy links appear on this page the moment each one goes live.
What is the book actually about?
Thirty years told through the things that went wrong and what I did about them. Banks, airlines, a building society, a holiday company, a mobile network, a games console manufacturer and a pizza place — with every complaint reference number present and correct. Around that there's the rest of a life: leaving school at sixteen, thirteen years in IT, a Christmas lights display that took over a street, a move to a smallholding in the flattest part of Lincolnshire, and a 2am World Cup match in a pub that opened specially.
Is it a misery memoir?
No. It's not a business book either, and there's no chapter at the end where I tell you the seven habits that changed my life. It's written the way I'd tell it down the pub. There's swearing, there are stories where I come off worse than the person I was complaining about, and those have been left in — a book where I'm right every time would be both boring and a lie.
Who is BigDopeyWill?
Me. It's been my handle online for the better part of a decade, it's the domain this page sits on, and it describes the contents more accurately than my actual name does. Will Young is the bloke who writes the complaint letters. BigDopeyWill is the one who stands on the fish. Legally it's the same person, and he lives in Wrangle, Lincolnshire, and works in IT.
Did an AI write it?
No, and I've put that on page one rather than buried it at the back. Every word is mine — my stories, my voice, my opinions, my mistakes. What the AI did was shape it, chase down dates and reference numbers, and tell me when chapter twelve contradicted chapter six. There's a whole chapter at the back about working that way, including a list of the things it got wrong, because it got things wrong regularly and every one of them was caught by a human reading it.
How do I actually get a complaint taken seriously?
The short version, which is also the only lesson in the book: write it down, keep the receipt, and don't accept the first answer anybody gives you. Ask the question that has an answer — say the specific thing, and number it if you have to. Go over the wall when you have to, and be nice when you get there, because the person who can fix it is almost never the person who caused it. And know when to close the folder. I'm still working on that one.
Can I complain about the book?
Please do. There's a form on this page that composes the email for you, or you can go direct to escalate@bigdopeywill.uk. I'll respond within twenty-eight days. Probably. I'd hate for you to have to take it further.
Form BDW/12 · Complaint submission
Ref BDW-2026-0000
Sheet 12 of 12
Submit your complaint
About the book, the spelling, the swearing, or the fact that I filed a chargeback on a pizza on my way into surgery. Fill it in and I'll compose the email for you — it goes to escalate@bigdopeywill.uk. I'll respond within twenty-eight days. Probably.
Received
Acknowledgement of complaint
Your reference is . Here's the email, ready to go.