ONE of the scariest sentences, well to my mind anyway, is one which begins 'For our customers' convenience'. It's usually followed by a list of 'improvements' which are to be made to what has been a perfectly adequate service which has worked reasonably well for many years. True, there may have been a few glitches, but nothing a sensible, and logical, solution couldn't be found for. But no, suddenly some bright spark with too much time on his or her hands decides that things have to change. The customers' need a bigger, better and very definitely a very much altered service and by God they are going to get it. Whether they want it or not. And so we end up with the biggest 'for our customers' convenience' faux pas in many a year. Faux pas? Not so much a false step but a giant leap in the wrong direction. I'm talking about the new style telephone directory which still, after all this time, brings me out in a rash every time I think about it. Not a week goes by that I don't sling one of the wretched books across whatever room I happen to be in at the time. The cats have become quite proficient at ducking and now associate the use of the telephone with the approach of a forthcoming airborne missile. In case you don't know, and anyone with a telephone probably does, those who produce the directories decided for some unknown, or at least to the rest of the sane world, reason to divide the book which is supposed to cover Cornwall into one that covers Cornwall without the addition of Saltash, Torpoint and surrounding villages. These were incorporated into the Plymouth directory which didn't contain any numbers beyond the two towns. In other words, if you lived in Saltash or Torpoint and wanted to look up someone who lived in Liskeard you'd had it. You needed another telephone book. A few cynical people among us, not me of course, thought this might be a ploy to get more people ringing directory enquiries. I'm assured this alleged devious ploy is entirely a falsehood put about by people driven to distraction by not being able to find the number of anything past Trerulefoot roundabout. The reaction is similar if you live in Looe and want a Torpoint number, or as I do in Callington and want to call someone Saltash. What has happened, after a fairly large outcry, partly to do with the ethnic insult of leaving a large bit of Cornwall out and partly to do with businesses in Saltash and Torpoint wondering why they aren't getting customers from further into the county, is that the telephone people threw up their hands in a sort of surrender and started handing out adjacent area books. Part of the result of this folly is that those of us who had old telephone directories now hang onto them like grim death and woebetide anyone who tries to get their hands on them for recycling. For all I know there's probably a blackmarket in old directories, sold by men in shabby anoraks approaching customers out of side alleys with the same shifty demeanour that used to accompany the selling of dirty postcards. Not that anyone has every tried to sell me a dirty postcard and anyway, in these so called enlightened times, we've gone well beyond dirty postcard selling. When I first moved here we had one telephone directory which covered not only the whole of Cornwall but Plymouth and parts of Devon, including Tavistock. It was perfectly adequate. The telephone people point out that there are so many more people on the telephone now that that is impossible, which may be true. When we first moved here we had to have a party line shared with the next door neighbours. Not an entirely satisfactory arrangement, but that's another story. Now there are a lot more people who have a telephone, practically everyone probably, but does it matter if the telephone directory is going to be bigger? After all, you don't exactly carry it around in your handbag and it doesn't seem to apply to Yellow Pages, which is now enormous (could this have something to do with the fact that you pay to be included?). I've given up trying to think of sensible reasons why all this has happened, except I'm sure it's been done by the same person who decided to split the book into business and residential so that some of us endlessly comb through one section before finding out that we're looking at the wrong end of the book. All this done for the customers' convenience. I hate to think what they might have done if they didn't like us.

I'll tell you another thing that annoys me, and I'm not alone. Telephone music. Why does everyone think I want to be kept waiting on the end of a telephone whilst accompanied by Val Doonican's Greatest Hits or a tinny version of the 1812 overture? What I actually want is not to be kept waiting, but that's not likely to happen, but having my eardrums assailed with alternate bursts of good old Val and a woman with a broad North Country accent telling me that they know I'm waiting but they're very busy and will get to me as soon as possible. Last week I rang American Express to make a simple enquiry, except that nothing is ever simple with any kind of bank or credit card company. I first went through the usual press button derby and then a tinny American voice told me that, yes, they were very busy etc. Then on came the most dreadful music which I can only describe as a cross between a Bolivian nose flute band on acid and a man banging a dustbin lid (possibly with the Saltash telephone directory). This went on for 18 minutes. If anything was calculated to make you switch immediately to another credit card company this was it. I mentioned the music to the real person I eventually spoke to, who wasn't American (I think they import the excuse tapes from the States) and she said she couldn't hear the music so didn't know what a torture it was. I was tempted to ask who chose it so I could reciprocate by ringing him or her at home and playing the Terry Wogan version of the Floral Dance song down the line for an hour. On Saturday I rang a mail order catalogue to complain that I'd only had part of the order and after pressing the requisite number of buttons to get through, or rather not to get through, to the department I wanted, I was overwhelmed with the theme tune from the Titanic, possibly after it had gone down. This was nothing compared to the lengthy evening spent trying to get through to firstly AOL's customer service department and then their tech support. Like most Internet firms they are a bit shy about telephone numbers so I had had to trawl their Internet site to find one. Which is somewhat difficult when you are ringing to say you can't get the Internet up and working. I could it, seems, get an infinite amount of help by clicking and pressing various parts of their site but if I wanted to speak to a real person I had to suffer the agonies of classical music played at half speed for up to half an hour at a time. And that's not counting being cut off. Yes, I know they're busy. They told me 38 times. There are times, when I've been driven to fever pitch by yet another version of Greensleeves, that I crack and shout something entirely unladylike down the telephone. Which is usually just about the same time the recorded message clicks off and a human voice clicks in. So I have to slam the telephone down, hoping they haven't got number recognition on their telephone, and start all over again with another dose of Greensleeves.