Having recently moved house and thinking that it might be nice to have a decent home Internet connection rather than two yoghurt pots and a piece of string (or dial-up, as it's sometimes known), I entered into the surreal and illogical world that is NTL.

It wasn't meant to be this way. The flat had a telephone socket, but BT didn't own it. NTL claimed that they had wired up the flat previously, so how much hassle could it be to reinstate the service? Ah, optimism.

Things went well to start with. We ordered a telephone account with broadband cable modem, which gave us free TV too. We explained that we didn't need this because we don't have a television set. There was a confused silence, then "Well, it's free anyway, so you'll get it."

So, an 'engineer' came around and found that there was no connection to the flat after all. To remedy this, he clumsily knock holes in walls, left dirty hand-prints everywhere, damaged skirting and doors and joked "Whoops, we've come here and wrecked the place." Not a good start, so that's the first complaint letter on the way.

Then, when trying to set up the cable modem, the service complained that either the PIN or the surname was incorrect. I'm pretty sure that I know my own surname, so it was time to check the PIN. After 45 minutes on hold I gave up.

Got through the next day to someone who said that he could give me the correct PIN using the modem serial number. But the modem was at home and I was at work, so that was no good. Called back in the evening, and after another 35 minutes on hold I was told that in fact they couldn't give me the PIN so I'd have to call customer services the next day instead.

So we tried that too, and they bounced us around for over an hour between customer services, technical support and the tea lady. At all times the people we spoke to were friendly, but unable to do anything that deviated even marginally from their scripts. After a lot of hassle we finally worked out that although NTL had provided us with a cable modem, which we'd requested, they thought they had given us a TV set-top box, which we hadn't requested and didn't want.

Blah, blah, blah. Another hour and a half later and a second direct debit ("Don't worry, we'll reduce the first one by the correct amount") and broadband is working. But not e-mail, because the mail servers are down today. Bring back the yoghurt pots.

Do you have similar stories about this or any other broadband provider? Feel free to share your rants in the forum. Trust me, it's good to moan.