Your call is important to us.  Queue annoying music interrupted periodically by unhelpful messages.

Hmm.  Not important enough to man the call centre sufficiently to prevent long queues.  We spent the entire morning on the ‘phone earlier in the week, dealing with banks, insurance, milk deliveries, eta of the new rigging, etc. etc..

Inexplicably, the car insurance people could not comprehend our wish to insure both cars while declaring them off the road for tax purposes.  The conversation looped:

“You need to contact the DVLA, I’ll cancel your policy”

“I understand I need to deal with the DVLA about tax. (That is easy.)  I want to maintain the insurance”

“OK”

“You can confirm that the cars will still be insured when they are not taxed?”

“No, I will cancel your policy”

“I want to keep the policy.  The cars might be stolen or the garage might burn down even though we are not driving them and they are therefore not taxed.”

“You need to contact the DVLA, I’ll cancel your policy”

And so it continued for 20 minutes.  As the charging structure of our phone / broadband / tv contract is a mystery that runs close second to pricing of rail tickets, I have no idea whether to be annoyed about the cost of the call, or just the time it takes to get nowhere.  Fortunately, if you phone the same company masquerading as a new customer you get to speak with someone with that is able to help you with (it turns out) a straightforward enquiry.

The only organisation to come out with any degree of credit this week was first direct.  Ever reliable, the ‘phone is answered on first ring, by a human, with an accent you can understand, who understands your problem and can almost always sort it out.  Wouldn’t bank with anyone else.  Maybe they do car insurance?