You know the score. Your computer wakes up one morning and thinks it’s a cauliflower so you spend two hours on the phone to a man in Mumbai who has a set list of possible remedies, none of which makes the slightest bit of difference. You beg and beg for a technician to come round but the internet provider doesn’t have any technicians; only a room full of parrot men in India, who think a wireless connection can be fixed by endlessly typing numbers into a laptop, even though the reason your “black box” isn’t working is because it’s in the dog.

That night, the fury in your heart is so vibrant that it has become an all-consuming entity. A big jaggedy spike in your head. Sleep is impossible.

All you can think about is what you would do to the boss of the internet service provider were you to encounter him in the street one day. Last night, in my mind, I spent two hours poking him in the chest asking how in the name of all that’s holy he ever thought a broken box in Notting Hill could possibly be fixed by an uninterested parrot man in India. And then I think I might have set him alight and thrown him on the fire I started by burning the boss who thought flimsy ring pulls on tins of soup are a good idea.

Of course, we have this rage and frustration in so many other areas of our everyday lives as well. Bought a new toothbrush recently? Tried to get it out of the packaging? I have and there is nothing I would like more than for the chief executive of Mouths R Us to come round to my house and show me how it is possible without cutting all his fingers off.

Likewise, I should very much enjoy for George Clooney to drop by one day and explain why each spoonful of the Nespresso coffee he advertises so suavely needs to be wrapped in an individual container. I am no environmentalist, but he is, and I would love to hear his views on why such an enormous amount of packaging is a good idea when a patio heater is not.

Then you have those extremely expensive corkscrews that you buy at Christmas time because it’s 5.25pm and the shops are about to shut and you haven’t got anything for your dad. The managing director of the company must know that after three days the action will become so stiff your wrist will snap before the rioja gives up its cork. He must. But he does nothing about it. So I’d like to see him on fire as well.

I want to see all of them on fire until they learn to say to their design and development teams: “No. This is not right. You are all blithering idiots, so go away and do it again.”

And hello, banks. Why do you not fit your hole-in-the-wall cash machines with red flashing lights so that we discover they are out of service when we drive by? Not after we have gone to the trouble of parking our cars half a mile away.

Then we get to the airport, where I have another question. Why subject someone to a humiliating strip search when they are a blue-eyed nine-year-old girl, or Paul McCartney. It’s a waste of time for you and a waste of time for everyone in the queue that results. If you know someone to be Paul McCartney, then you know he is an elderly singer and not a crazed suicide bomber. So he can be waved through immediately, leaving you time to concentrate on the sweating Afghan with wires poking out of his back pack.

Governments, of course, are fantastically uninterested in the people they are supposed to serve. Which is why you have Gordon Brown committing us all to a target of cutting CO2 emissions by 80%, which will cost about 2% of the nation’s GDP. And not work. While at the same time deciding that the navy’s new aircraft carriers will be powered by carbon-rich diesel, and not nuclear reactors, to save £3.50.

I don’t mind mistakes; the chap who accidentally forgets to close the doors on the ferry, for instance. These are errors. These are evidence of human fallibility. What I cannot abide is the wilful lack of interest in customers that ruins everything we buy and everything we do these days.

Except smoking. Over the years, I have worked my way through perhaps a million cigarettes and not one of them has ever come out of the packet shaped like a penis, or covered in mud. Not one has ever refused to light, or exploded while I am driving along. You sometimes get a beetle in your chocolate bar or an earwig in your curry. But cigarettes? Every single one is just as you would expect. A perfectly tailored nicotine delivery service.

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