Real life | 8 June 2017

‘I’m afraid you’ve made a mistake with my council tax,’ I said to the lady at Guildford Borough Council.

‘Right,’ she said, only just disguising a yawn and starting to tap away doing something else on her computer. I wasn’t surprised. I had just been through a series of recorded options that more than adequately summed up what Guildford Borough’s expectations of its customers were. Pretty much: ‘Press one if you’ve had a letter about a bailiff’s visit, press two if you feel you’ve got some vague, tenuous piece of information which will persuade us to let you off your council tax, only it won’t. Press three if you want to hear those options again. Or, if you still feel you need to speak to someone, press four, although there’s really no point because we are never going to let you speak to a human being and pressing four will actually just tell you slowly and sarcastically that you can manage your account online by going to: double-you… double-you… double-you dot… Guildford dot… gov dot…UK backslash… how to pay my council tax and stop making a nuisance of myself.’

But I managed to circumnavigate this by using the same trick I employ with the bank, which is to refuse to press any option and, when it switches to ‘Please say what you are calling about’, to repeatedly say ‘bowl of soup’ until they give up and declare: ‘Please hold, we need to connect you to one of our customer-service representatives. All calls are recorded because you’ve really hacked us off now, wasting our time, I bet you only want something that was in the options.’

But once I was through that little lot, a nice lady said hello, and I began to argue about a shock demand for £3,100 a year in council tax for my two-bedroom ‘dream’ cottage.