PLEASE would someone form a militant group to defend the rights of the consumer? Enough is enough. Do you remember how we really did believe (doh!) that the age of the computer and the internet would simplify all our transactions and dealings with service providers?

This week, I wasted a measurable fraction of my life trying, on behalf of my daughter, to make sense out of the labyrinthine manoeuvres of the Student Loan Company who have given her different – and that is radically different – advice and information each time she has phoned them over the last year in connection with the funding and grant for a course which she has now finished and which still has not been resolved.

A third party might marvel at the adroitness with which they dismiss the advice given by other employees of the same company and moreover blame the applicant for failing to supply information they have never asked for. But the applicant experiences only frustration and rage.

The same rage and frustration was felt by a friend who has tried unsuccessfully to have a telephone line and internet reconnected at a home she and her husband moved into in May.

Like my daughter, my friend – a calm and gentle woman not known for her excesses of fury – told me that she hated what the telephone company had turned her into as she has spent tens of pounds phoning them on her mobile only to be referred by engineering to customer support, who in turn referred her to the new customers department, whence she was referred to faults etc etc.

Each time involved a new selection of multiple option button pressing. Each time she had to experience the embarrassment of asking the resident of some distant country (who is presumably cheaper than their equivalent here) to repeat what they were saying several times as she could not understand their heavily-accented English.

On several occasions, after hanging on for 15 or more minutes she was cut off. When she gave up and cancelled the order and went to another provider, suddenly company number one is interested, deluging her with plaintive ‘Why have you left us’ messages.

We’re all sick of call centres, of multiple choices that never offer one that fits your requirement, of companies that make it impossible for us to speak to someone who can actually solve our problems.