Call your local bank at any time of the day or night and you will be greeted by the same automated message telling you it’s receiving higher than normal call volumes. A female voice (more soothing?) will then apologise for the delay and remind you that you can manage your finances online or via a mobile app. Finally, the entire spiel will be repeated in Maltese.

Two long and painful minutes later, when you’re already tetchy and close to giving up, you’ll be given the official welcome and asked again whether you wish to continue the call in English or Maltese. This is where the real fun begins.

If you are an existing customer, you will be instructed to press 1.

Never a good idea.

Because if you naively choose to go down that road you will be asked to key in either your account number or your date of birth, which begs the question should you key in ‘03’ or ‘3’ and should the month follow the day.

This can challenge the best of us, particularly when (a) you don’t know your account number offhand and (b) you find navigating a smartphone just a little bit fiddly. But even if you are lucky enough to have memorised your number and have managed the typing, the chances are that the system will still fail to recognise you and cut you off.

You have now entered the first circle of Dante’s Inferno, otherwise known as phone tree hell.

I’ve been there. We all have. 

So, you start again, careful this time not foolishly to press 1. You try the other options instead. I leave you to decide whether that’s out of sheer desperation or perverse curiosity.

Experience tells me that you’re usually better off pressing option 3, even if you have no wish to report a lost or stolen card. This will at least get you transferred (eventually) to a real person called ‘Customer Care’ and will save you being given the run around by a literal-minded computer dedicated to filtering you and then freezing you out of the system.

But, before that, you will have to suffer their choice of manic or soothing ‘on hold’ music. One bank actually played ‘Let it Go’ from Disney’s Frozen on a loop. And if you didn’t ‘let it go’, you were eventually frozen.  

Talk about hell freezing over. You really couldn’t make this stuff up. Congratulations. You have escaped the second circle of hell.

No matter what bank or company you call, IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems are unnecessarily complicated and seem designed to make you hang up and give up.

Which, of course, defeats their raison d'être. So why offer a service and then hide the most crucial option of all in a digital labyrinth?

The majority of people who telephone banks are either unfamiliar with internet banking or face mobility issues. They have probably tried to solve the problem themselves and now feel they have no other option but to speak to a human being.

Why offer a service and then hide the most crucial option of all in a digital labyrinth?- Michela Spiteri

They won’t be wanting a multitude of confusing options, just simple contact. So, please, can banks (and other entities) cut the crap and offer them direct access to an adviser or representative as a stand-alone option?

Thank you.

Frankly, I don’t believe

anyone buys the idea that his individual call is ‘important’ to the bank, let alone that call volumes are always unprecedented.

But even if we buy those fictions, the people who set up these fatuous computerised systems should realise that nobody in his right mind would ever choose to pick up a telephone unless he needed to speak to someone on the other end. People in a position to use online banking would never put themselves through the agony.

I speak for myself, of course. Although I sense I’m speaking for others, especially the elderly.

I’m thinking now of my visually impaired ageing uncle who, whenever in receipt of a letter or SMS from the bank, has to rely on others to read it to him. Not to put too fine a point on it, he is just the sort of customer to whom banks owe a solemn duty of care.

Losing track of a cheque or fretting over something that in the end requires only a simple explanation and a modicum of reassurance  should not be stressful experiences. An open and friendly telephone link – ideally not to a remote call centre – should suffice.

Even I, aged 48, am often overwhelmed by ‘options’ and the waiting involved.

I can easily imagine, therefore, how torturous it must be for somebody who is almost twice my age, doesn’t see or simply can’t follow the instructions.

Customers should be able to access services quickly and easily and banks should do more to ensure that this is expedited. I mention again that opportunity to speak to an adviser at the very beginning of a call and, for good measure, why not when the IVR is actually in full flight and proving too much for the customer?

There’s another stumbling block: clunky security measures. Of course, banks need to be sure you’re the person you say you are (let alone that you’re not being held at gunpoint). But there should be an option for general queries that are ‘low-risk’ and impersonal, the kind not requiring excessive security.

As things are now, whenever we place the dreaded call, I stand next to my uncle on tenterhooks, holding up papers with his account number in gigantic print, even attempting frantic whispered prompts for fear of being detected by the representative at the other end. I even mime.

It’s both mad and maddening. On one level bizarre (unless you are pitching an idea for a Seinfeld episode); on another no way to live life at all. And old age is hard enough as it is.

Can we, therefore, bank on banks to come up with something to make our lives easier, especially the lives of senior citizens? Thank you.