Notes to self: Hotline to insanity

There are two words that send a chill down my spine; words so terrifying they make my heart beat faster and my palms go clammy. Customer service.

If you think I am being overdramatic, you clearly have a secretary who can deal with all these annoyances for you. Anyone who has had to wait on a phone line for 30 minutes while listening to Abba's The Winner Takes It All on loop and then been cut off when a person finally receives the call will understand my distress. This process is often repeated until you feel you might rip off every hair from your head in frustration.

On the whole, I consider contacting most customer-service teams, of both national or international companies, about as productive — and not quite as fun — as repeatedly smashing my face into the keyboard.

I will go to great lengths to avoid calling my bank. I have let my former landlord off from paying me the Dh400 he owes me just because I can't face the stress of calling his awful customer-service department. I feel I have spent Dh400 on saving my sanity. It's money well spent.

A friend of mine recently sent several emails and made phone calls that amounted to about 25 working hours on the phone, speaking to 12 customer-service agents of a bank to just order a replacement debit card. This simple request almost caused my friend to lose her sanity. I never found out if she eventually got the card or if she decided to organise a bank break-in to recover the money she has every right to access. It would probably have been the easier option.

Unfortunately this isn't an unusual situation. I am quite sure customer-service departments are just a ploy to stop us from calling our banks, internet-service providers and airlines. Customer-service departments are there to deter us from making a fuss and let them get on with doing their jobs poorly without any pesky customers pointing it out to them. It's a similar concept to aversion therapy. If they make it a painful-enough experience, you will eventually stop doing it.

Apart from being put on hold, getting cut off and never getting through to speak to anyone, there is the problem of the staff. I'm sure some call centre workers are very knowledgeable and helpful but I have never had the pleasure of speaking to any of them. I only seem to catch those who seem alarmed they have to deal with customer queries; as though they thought they were being paid to sit and file their nails all day.

Once you have explained your query to them, you can be sure they will a) not have understood the query, no matter how simple it is, b) offer the most basic advice or state the obvious and then be stumped when you say you have already pursued that avenue (for example: Me: "I can't seem to get on to the internet" Them: "Is your computer turned on?" Me: "Yes" Them: "Oh"), or c) decide they can't be bothered dealing with this call and hang up.

Unfortunately, I can't think of a way of avoiding this necessary evil. I would ordinarily suggest that with a problem, you should call up and complain — but in this case, you would probably never get through and when you finally do, the person who supposedly "logged" your complaint would give you a false name and never call you back, the result being that there will never be any record that you called them up in the first place. I suppose the one silver lining is that avoiding calling customer-service departments has cut down on my phone bill.