What is it with companies and their customer service departments these days? Do they only employ people with learning difficulties, or is it that they require all employees who type important data into company computer systems to wear boxing-gloves whilst typing?

This last week or so, I’ve had to deal with three big companies on matters of what one could consider ‘precision-important’ tasks. You know the sorts of thing: debiting monthly payments from the correct bank account; having them write to you at your current address rather than one you lived at two years ago; fixing your bank account so that the monthly statements appear as, er, monthly statements, rather than as a never-ending litany of ‘recent transactions’ where recent can mean ‘aeons ago’.

What I don’t understand is that in all cases, whether I’m speaking to a chirpy bint in Liverpool, a switched-on geezer from Coventry, or a university-graduate in Bangalore, they all seemed to be perfectly sentient and capable at the time. They all read back my instructions, point by point, number by number, line by line, and everything checked out perfectly.

So what went wrong?

Did they simply scribble the information onto a Post-It note that got lost when they embarked on their next game of inter-departmental chair-racing? Or does their multi-million pound computer system randomly add characters or numbers to things, or pick data out of a giant internet hat, for comedy purposes? Who can tell?

But in terms of who cares, I’m in that loooooong queue. The one with all the people in it who resent having to play telephone bingo for five minutes just in order to be able to speak to these numbskulls and have their information compromised, lost or just plain fudged-up.

It’s like the companies have got wise to our well-documented end-user hatred of automated callsystems, and they know that what we really want is a good, old-fashioned, helpful person to speak to, rather than a faceless, heartless machine. But they don’t want to give us that, because decent humans cost decent money, so instead, “Let’s have half of both,” says their Director of Miscommunications. “Let’s have the most-basic telephone bingo-system that dumps 50% of the callers right back where they started – listening to a dial-tone – and for the remaining diehards who make it through, let’s put a bunch of really helpful-sounding but ultimately armless, memory-less or just plain clueless humans on to properly mishandle the call.”

Sorted. Or, as would be recorded by such a system: “Mostly Agree. 13 out of 10.”