Criticising call-centre tech support is rather like picking on a retarded midget – it’s not big and it’s not clever. It is, however, a fantastic way of venting days of pent up aggression though, so I’m going to launch into it with all the confidence of an adrenalized bull.

I spent nigh on two fucking hours on the phone to – ironically – BT the other day, negotiating the seemingly simple task of transferring a phone line from one Flat to another. As if that wasn’t easy enough, I offered the nonplussed bint at the other end of the phone the option of giving me an entirely new number. Basically I made the premise of the operation as basic as possible. Now I’m not sure exactly how BT conduct their front-line business from wherever they may be (18th century Serbia perhaps) but you’d expect one of the countries premier companies to be running a system marginally more advanced than an Atari 2600.

The crux of the problem which led to me being put on hold for 50 excruciatingly soundtracked minutes – twice (no exaggeration: I managed to clean my oven, have 3 wanks and solve the Yang–Mills existence and mass gap problem in the interim) – was a problem in finding out if my old number existed. Evidently this required the navigation of vast, thinly paged tomes a mile in depth, records flicked through with all the speed and grace of an obese American tourist negotiating a staircase. Perhaps the archive retrieval required an Indiana Jones-esque journey into the BT basement, where hordes of gremlin children guard gold gilded ark’s that hide dusty volumes with misspelt surnames and slightly incorrect Flat numbers, postcodes a digit out of place. Maybe the method of locating these files involved chucking a thin rope with a meat hook on the end into a large vat of babies, names and numbers tattooed onto their chests like satanic birthmarks.

Whatever method they were using, it was fucking useless. Maybe if they spent less money on depressingly clinical adverts featuring washed up British sitcom actors, run through a white filter in post-production that creates the impression he’s calling his mum in purgatory, and more money updating their archaic database system (perhaps Microsoft Excel?), they could get back to me in a response time less suited to Hurricane Katrina survivor rescue (take that George Bush).

Next week: Simon bullies an 8 year old with braces.