My three wishes: world peace, a beautiful body and a grumpy call centre worker that I can handle.

In fact, I will change the order of those wishes and put the latter first.

I rang my internet provider for the first time on January 19 after a couple of weeks of intermittent broadband which failed at the most critical times.

My call was answered reasonably quickly by a pleasant young man in India, who gave me his name and assured me he was going to fix my problem.

Could I please hang on for two or three minutes while he performed some checks?

I was to learn in the coming six weeks or so that Indian call centre three minutes and real time can be quite different.

But I wasn’t going to complain – not when it was so obvious the man on the other end of the phone was desperate to help me.

Six weeks it went on!

Finally, last Saturday I had a real person turn up to my house. He spent fewer than 30 minutes here and fixed it.

By about the second week of phone calls I wanted to vent. I wanted to yell and scream and tell people they were idiots. But how could I?

Every time someone answered the phone they called me by name. They apologised profusely.

It was all their fault and the only reason they were even living was because of their great desire to solve my problems.

In fact, if they could, they would fly over themselves to soothe my fevered brow, fix my internet and lay a carpet of roses for me to walk on!

When irritation started to creep in they would ask you questions about your life and the weather here and tell me what was happening in India.

During one conversation my age came up. There was a gasp of surprise. Apparently I sound SO much younger on the phone!

I had one woman who told me she would not be getting off the phone until my problem was fixed – no matter how long it took!

It took a long time, but it didn’t fix my problem!

Actually, there are two problems here.

The first is my internet wasn’t working. Secondly, my ulcer was growing rapidly. There was no way I could tell these unfailingly polite people I hated their company and their lack of progress and everything else about them without coming across as some great bully.

Why don’t I just go and kick a puppy?

Better idea! I am going to kick someone from our power provider.

About four days after getting a letter to say our bill would remain the same for the next 12 months we got a letter to say it was being increased and there was nothing they could do because we were already on the lowest tariff.

I called them.

After 70 minutes – 70 minutes! – a man answered and suggested we go onto a lower, fixed tariff which means our bill would not rise for two years.

But we are on the lowest tariff.

No, no! That must be a mistake.

Yeah! I bet it was! I bet they hoped most customers just accept and the rest won’t persevere for the time it takes to answer the phone while all the time reminding us: “Your call is important.”

Sky, on the other hand, has outperformed them all.

In a week where everything in our house went wrong, I had to ring them on Saturday.

A man answered within about three minutes, diagnosed my problem, talked me through it and within 10 minutes we were watching TV again!