Online, humanity-free “service” when trying to obtain anything these days has the following blindingly obvious disadvantages:

1. The site architecture is usually designed by someone who couldn’t even walk a straight line when stone cold sober.

2. The software is so poor that the slightest detail out of the ordinary will evoke ‘invalid’…more often than not requiring one to take at least five steps backwards.

3. For some reason the ASA and TDA rules don’t apply, and so no single price for any object or service is ever less than 30% below what actually appears on the final invoice page.

4. Trying to find a live telephone number for help with a technical problem (that’s theirs, not mine) is akin to trying to find the smallest grain of sand on Waikiki Beach with the naked eye.

5. The process probably causes at least 5,000 strokes per year, which is damaging to all State health services.

6. The total amount of unemployment caused by this pathetic excuse for proper service worldwide would fill most South American countries. It is exceeded only by the total amount of thoroughly undeserved and dysfunctional money made by Wall Street and the mythical ‘shareholder’ over the last thirty years as a result of it.

7. The fact that no Party at Westminster will even countenance passing a law saying voice-2-voice service numbers must be featured on all commercial websites tells you everything you need to know about whose really running this insane world we inhabit.

I’ve spent (to be more accurate, wasted) two hours I can ill-afford this morning dealing with false pricing structures, hidden extras billed as ‘no hidden extras’, software cockups, and – final irony of ironies – getting billed for an air-fare transaction I abandoned because it kept telling me a cheap flight they had flagged up had ‘no validity’. That said, the bombastic Slog tearing the buggers to shreds when I finally did find a real person at the end of the phone was well worth the wait.

I shall name and shame the two companies involved, if only so that others can avoid them. The first was of course O’Leary’s appalling Ryanair. This was the company’s idea of a live-chat response:

Well  f**k me Lilla, d’yer know girl, I never thought of doing that.

The second was edreams.com, an outfit that confirmed my purchase hadn’t completed…..

….and then 20 minutes later sent me this:

Yes, edreams….we take you even further round the bend than you were before you started by selling invalid flights we’d earlier suggested were valid and then confirming your purchase of an invalid flight that was in reality valid after all.

Note how the non-completion I’d annulled was mine, but the confirmation was theirs: ‘you screwed up – but fear not, we sorted it for you’. As opposed to the diametric opposite aka The Truth.

Imagine the affronted call-centre man I finally found – Sadik in Delhi – who merely answered everything I tried to point out with “you have confirmed, so the flight is standing”.

Other things for which I still have no explanation: why Ryanair’s ‘all fees included’ contained not one but two booking fees with only one person travelling; why the edreams 24/7 priority helpline was closed; and why calls trying to correct a Ryanair screw-up cost €1.02 a minute.

Here’s a better strapline for these two companies: Edreams and Ryanair…We Go further to F**k you Over.

Three years ago I posted here to the effect that were Ryanair to be successful in its bid for Aer Lingus, the new airline should be called Cunnilingus. I’ve seen nothing to change that view.

Last night at The Slog: Solved – the mystery of how Mick Hucknell gets shagged a lot