You have been waiting in a queue got forty minutes, plagued by a particularly annoying busker who can play only one piece of music on a tinny electric organ. Suddenly an official arrives and says: "You have been waiting too long. Get to the back of the queue and start all over again."

Unfair? Doesn't make sense? Yet this is exactly what can happen with Virgin Media, the expensively rebranded NTL-Telewest.

I won't bore you with the details of how I spent an hour and a half on Friday, and from 9-30am to 5pm on Saturday, failing to change my package. Mostly it was a game of navigating voice menus and then hanging on to the same ghastly jingle until you reached an actual human who said you were talking to the wrong person.

I had the speakerphone on to allow me to do other things and at one point, hoping to goad the company into replying, I chose the option for people planning to move to another supplier. To my astonishment, after about 40 minutes, the ensuing "wait for us" jingle stopped and a voice said: "The other party has cut off."

I suppose it is one way to try to delay defections but it could also get Virgin Media sued for wasting people's time.

Still, I refused to be defeated. It became a challenge to talk to someone who would not pass me on to someone else. Late on Saturday afternoon I finally spoke to a woman who appeared willing to help me. "Hang on, I'll consult my supervisor," she said.

This time there was proper music on the line, which was somehow reassuring. Then, out of nowhere, the voice-response system kicked in, offering two completely irrelevant options. I picked one at random. "You're talking to wrong person," the man said.

Richard Branson's Virgin was supposed to be bringing improved customer relations to the cable company. If this it, please give me back friendly old Telewest.