I miss the days when if you called a company or an organization up and there wasn't anybody available to take your call at that moment you just couldn't get through, so the line would register as engaged and that would be the end of it.

I don't think phone-peg systems are any improvement to being told straight out that the line is busy, try again later. You spend five minutes listening to a disturbingly polite robot voice reeling off lists of confusing options, reminding you that your call may be recorded 'for training purposes' - what the Hell does that mean? - and futilely pressing buttons on your phone's keypad in the hope that one of them will allow you to talk to an actual human being, only to get stuck in a virtual queue.

Said virtual queue means being bombarded with a tinny rendition of some overplayed pop tune that was red-hot for five seconds three years ago, or an even more overplayed classical standard that, were you to actually hear it played on the radio, would cause repressed memories of the ritual abuse that is being stuck in Phone Peg Purgatory. The one thing the classical standard and the pop tune have in common is that ninety-nine times out of a hundred the poor soul stuck listening to them doesn't want to hear either of them, and that both are interrupted roughly every thirty seconds by the same robot-woman (whose voice is starting to sound worryingly headmistressy) reminding you that your call is in a queue and will be answered shortly, as if you'd forgotten that since the last time she reminded you.

It's as if whoever decided this system decided that one alone just wouldn't be annoying enough - no, they just had to have both.

Certainly they have no faith whatsoever in the intelligence of the average user. Do they really think that the poor soul trying to contact them for whatever reason will be so soothed by, say, Coldplay's Parachutes or half a movement of the Four Seasons that they'll forget they have a phone to their ear and a pencil poised in their waiting fingers to write down whatever it is they're calling to find out? So much so that they need reminding that they're trying to call the bank, not listening to Radio Two?

Sometimes, of course, you're not even fortunate enough to get that. While trying to enquire what the Hell was going on with my housing benefit having received two wildly contradictory letters about the status of my claim which were sent out on the exact same day, one of which cannot be accurate simply by default, I was turned back at the gates of Phone Peg Purgatory by somebody called Amanda. Amanda's job on this miserable Friday evening was to inform anyone trying to call the benefits centre that their advisers were far too swamped with calls for her to even let anyone get automatically queued. Of course, in order to get through to this bepitchforked guardian of the call center, anyone calling up still had to go through all the pre-recorded computer chatter, please-press-one-now option-choosing and - yes - a brief burst of hold music.

I feel desperately sorry for this woman - whatever she's being paid for this thankless task, it's clearly not enough - and infuriated by the ridiculous please-join-this-telephonic-holding-pattern automated system that's been put into place which makes it necessary to have someone answer a call to let the person making it know that actually, their call can't be answered right now and could they call back later when hypothetically there might be someone available to answer them (but, unless they call within about five seconds of the lines opening, probably won't be).

Didn't we used to have something that did this automatically?

Oh yeah, it was called the engaged tone.