LAST month, I rang my bank to ask for my account to be transferred into a two-year bond. Initially I had hoped to do this transaction in person, but there was a seven-week wait for an appointment in the nearest branch, which is an hour’s train journey away. A few days after that call I went online to check, and found no sign of the account anywhere. It had vanished, along with a chunk of my savings.

By the time I got through to someone who could explain – half an hour listening to a musical loop designed to make you hang up or smash the phone against the wall – my heart had regained its natural rhythm. The woman on the end of the line told me that the account had been closed (what? why? by whom?) and a cheque for that amount was on its way to me. Blood pressure rocketed again.

Ten days later, with no sign of the cheque, I called once more. It took the usual 30 minutes to be connected – by now I knew to keep a book on hand to pass the time – and they promised to look into the missing cheque. Why couldn’t the money be transferred electronically, this being 2022? I never received an answer to that. Instead, they asked if the post was unreliable in my region.

Thus started several weeks of telephone ping-pong as I tried to find the whereabouts of my money. At this point, as far as I knew it was floating in the ether like space junk, forever beyond my reach. Sleepless nights followed, as well as a list of the call handlers that read like a reminder of the nation’s favourite baby names in the late 1990s.

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I got to know some of them well enough to learn the breed of their dogs and where they’re going on holiday. With only one exception, they were unfailingly professional and pleasant, presenting the best front line any institution could hope for to deflect the flak from its appallingly inefficient and unreachable backroom staff. I have known less soothing Samaritans. If only those in charge of investments had been as carefully selected.

I’ll return to the missing money shortly (thank you for your patience in waiting to hear the rest, your attention is very important to us…). In the meantime, a stressful experience was made a thousand times worse by not being able to talk to someone face to face.

It's not just the polar ice cap that is disappearing fast; so are bank branches. My local town had three, now it has none. It’s a familiar story all across the country. Banks tell us that this is what customers want, but I’d like to see the evidence for this incredible claim. Nobody I know is happy about travelling miles to speak to a teller – where they have to reveal highly personal information in a public space – or being obliged to conduct complicated affairs online or by phone.

The evaporation of banks and building societies from our high streets is tangible evidence that the customer is no longer king. Rather, the customer is always on hold. It’s the same with almost every line of business, from energy and broadband suppliers and insurers to phone companies and airlines. With too few staff on the switchboard, businesses treat consumers as if their time counts for nothing whereas theirs is costed by the second. As a result, nobody working nine to five has a chance of getting through in their coffee or lunch break. Instead, they must kiss goodbye to Saturday morning, when a skeleton staff is available. Planes have crossed the Atlantic more swiftly than the weekend handlers respond.

Unable to call anyone back on a direct line and speak to someone familiar with our query, nor allowed to send an email, we are effectively gagged. A neighbour spent 10 hours across two days trying to contact an airline for a refund. On one occasion, the line rang out for over an hour before it was disconnected and she had to start again. It’s all too common.

Thanks to the pandemic and what you might call the Covid cop-out, a situation that was already a creeping blight has escalated to the point of inducing nervous breakdowns. “Please be aware,” said the automated message on my car insurer’s line last week, “that it is taking slightly longer than usual to answer because of staff absences across some of our teams.”

When finally I made contact, at crack of dawn, the operative sounded as if she had worked through the night and had barely the energy to read out the small print. Theirs is not an enviable job.

Talk to anyone, and they have their own tale of woe about dealing with call centres, and watching a swathe of their life drain away. Compared to world events, the pathetic customer service many businesses offer is a small matter. But as a gauntlet that everybody must regularly run, it is wholly unacceptable. Symptomatic of an attitude towards those whose money they rely upon (or not, in the case of heavily state-supported banks), it smacks of contempt and disdain.

Collectively, the public has considerable power to withdraw custom from those firms that leave them in limbo for ridiculously long periods of time. Yet because they all seem to be equally bad, where would we go? Even worse, because we are dealt with on an individual basis, we forget we hold any cards at all. We are made to feel small and insignificant, frustrated and - in my case at least – almost despairing.

Nothing reveals more starkly how helpless we are in the face of huge corporations than having to wait for them to pick up. Or, as with my bank, to explain and correct an error. In the end, on the advice of a lawyer friend, I lodged a complaint. As if by magic, things were suddenly sorted in a matter of days. A new cheque was issued, and promptly arrived.

Fearful of any more mishaps, I took it to a different bank, and asked if I could open an ISA. “You’d be better doing it online,” the teller parroted, seemingly oblivious to the fact that she was dictating her own redundancy note.

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