in my soup, like crackers

Incandescent rage is such a bracing start to the weekend. I'm still trying to get the phone cabling in the house rewired, in a vague stab at preventing it from looking quite so much like a cyberpunk spider's web. So, after two months of fighting the hellish circularity of the Telkom helplines, including five separate calls, two separate fault logs, three emails, at least one non-existent reference number and, finally, this morning, a visit to the nearest branch in person (25 mins in queues), it transpires that I shouldn't be logging this call, because our ADSL isn't leased from Telkom. Imaginet should be logging it. In fact, they shouldn't, but their cheerfully geeky helpline guys managed to get an awful lot of "there, there" across when I phoned them up, and have logged a fault on my behalf even though it's not really their problem. (Nice Imaginet helpline guy: "Hi, Jonathan speaking, how may I help you?" Me, pathetically: "You can help by not being Telkom." Him, laughing: "That part we can generally do, ma'am.")

I cannot believe how psychotically angry it makes me to confront Telkom's giant bureaucracy, fat and complacent after years of monopoly, and clearly without the faintest interest in providing anything like customer service. They have refined passing the buck to the rarefied levels of a dadaist art form. I lose it with these people regularly, and end up shouting at them about how absolutely crap their company is, usually accompanied by wistful visions of breaking them into pieces and crunching them between my teeth. They look a bit wild around the eyes and pass me on to someone else as quickly as they can.

On the upside, I love dealing with Imaginet because I know that the geeks on the other end will completely understand when I sign off my official back-up email asking them to log the fault, with "Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope!"