Calling the bank is a soul-sapping experience – but it needn’t be that way

It’s a riddle of the modern age: when is your bank not experiencing ‘unusually high call volumes’? You can puzzle the answer while listening to 20 minutes of looped Vivaldi interrupted sporadically by a disembodied female voice apologising for this delay.

I recently called my bank at around 10.30 at night and endured exactly the same routine.