Spare us this day our daily hassles, give us better service

When I move apartment, the main burden is not carrying the plasma but setting up an ADSL connection. The reason: I never quite know when the connection will be ready.

When I last had to ask my service provider for an estimated time of arrival, a help desk operator dodged the question, saying: 'We encourage you to plug your router into your computer every day to see if it's working.'

I told him I had better things to do, but complied compulsively until finally both green lights on the router came on. Hooray!

What bugs me is that businesses obsessed with increasing shareholder value routinely transfer the hassle on to you in the name of that buzzword 'choice', which really means 'do it yourself' or even '**** you'. No company seems prepared to commit the resources to meet you half way and, well, serve a little, even if the idea sounds residually feudal.

Banks are particularly unhelpful. When you ring, first they guilt-trip you, asking that you have your account details ready so they can handle more calls.

After you negotiate the voice prompt maze, thanks to the wonder of outsourcing, you are put through to a call centre drone in Malaysia, who has no insight and little to offer of any description except, with luck, a nice speaking manner. The drone parrots responses that often have little or no bearing on what you ask - any observations you make are met with silence or total inanities because commentary is just not covered in the script.