I have just got off the phone from BT in an attempt to disconnect my land line, and have had the most ridiculous conversation I believe I've had with any customer service representative. For a start, I was put through to four different people and kept waiting for a quarter of an hour before getting a straight answer for what should be a relatively straightforward problem. For another thing, when someone did finally decide to help, I got this dialogue out of them:

"Hello," I said (rather too enthusiastically under the circumstances) "I'd like to move house and disconnect my phone line please!"

“Oh”, says Mr Enthusiasm (Northern England Region) 1973, “you can’t disconnect until the 28th February. We can't do it before then I'm afraid”.

“But I’m moving out on Sunday,” I say, “does that not mean that the people moving in will be able to use my line?”

“Yeah,” he replies dopily, his voice dropping like Eeyore.

“Well, don’t you think that’s a bit of a dodgy situation?”

“Oh, I don't know” he replies, “I’ll just go and ask customer service”.

Anyway, the (unreliable?) upshot of this conversation is that he’s charged me £26 to put a bar on the account, they CAN’T disconnect until the 28th February, and we have to phone again on that date to get all our services reconnected. I've accused them of ripping me off, but the man on the phone put me on hold as soon as I did that.

I despair. I really do despair. Everytime I come into contact with BT I feel like emigrating. They're the most appalling company I've ever dealt with in my life. They behave like a company staffed entirely by people on valium.