The World's Local Bank. Not.

It's a hot Friday afternoon in rural Cumbria. At 3:15 I step up to the cashpoint at HSBC in Aspatria - a branch that's open two afternoons a week and, for all I know, spends the rest of its time being a trendy winebar (if such a thing could exist in Aspatria). The machine takes my card - and promptly decides to re-boot itself. By the time it's wandered back from the middle-distance of clearing its cache & registering with whatever DNS it required, it's forgotten that my card is trapped somewhere in its intestines.

Two hours and several phone calls later, someone in Bombay has assured me that he's cancelled my card and a new one will be with me in five working days. When I point out to him that I am penniless on a Friday afternoon and intending to drive to London on business first thing Monday morning, he's at a loss to suggest how I might be reunited with the money which I foolishly entrusted to his incompetent employer.

I'd strongly recommend that any readers holding an account with this bank close it immediately & move to one that actually has a Saturday morning counter-service. Better still, try to find one that doesn't run its ATMs on OS/2 WARP, a computer operating system abandoned some time in Late Antiquity by corporations whose IT departments didn't want to be laughing stocks. Better still, go and bank with one of those posh outfits that actually still aspire to face-to-face service. That way, when this sort of thing happens you will at least have the satisfaction of taking the poltroons and periwigged flunkeys they employ and horsewhipping them the length of Pall Mall.

Note to HSBC's Customer Service Training Dept: it's not a good idea to tell your staff to use the words 'But I've just explained to you . . .' when addressing valued customers.