Some readers will have noticed that September was a quiet month for IT Reviews, with only a handful of new reviews appearing on these pages. That's mostly my fault, first for going on holiday and subsequently for contracting a particularly nasty form of 'flu that laid me low for nearly two weeks. For various reasons, the holiday was only a marginally more pleasant experience than the 'flu. Being a moaning bastard, upon my return I fired off letters to Thompson, for kicking us out of our hotel some 14 hours before the bus arrived to take us to the airport, and to Britannia for providing us with a delightful 7 hour delay when we finally reached said airport.

After a week or so, I received two letters, one from each company, both stating that they had received my letter, and would I please bear with them as this was a busy period and they had a lot of correspondence to answer. So, obviously I wasn't the only one to complain. Another couple of weeks later, and two more letters arrived, both apologising for my unpleasant experience and assuring me that they would pass my comments on to the people concerned as part of their drive to improve customer satisfaction.

"Balls", I thought. Those two letters could have come from the same person. or, in fact, the same computer. If I had any doubt that at least one of the letters was standard computer-generated fare, they were eliminated when a BBC Watchdog programme covered the strange occurrence of the couple who were so pleased with their holiday that they wrote to Thompson to express their appreciation. They received the same letters I did. The couple wrote again, insisting that they were actually happy with the service offered. This time they received a letter stating that no, they were not entitled to any compensation. Nice one, Thompson.

So what do 'customer services' in these companies actually do? Judging from my experience, they open letters from customers and enter the name and address of the complainer into a database. The first letter gets a 'Bear with us, we're busy' note, followed a few weeks later by the standard apology. Then, if another letter is received from the same person, they get the 'No compensation' letter. It doesn't matter what you actually write, you get the standard letters. Pity they didn't use a document scanner and some OCR software to search for the words 'complain', 'disgraceful' and 'tossers' before sending the standard replies. That would have been good use of computer technology - after all, it's just possible that not all the letters were complaints. Just possible...

All things considered, this probably is a good use of computer resources, although in this case it backfired and made the customer (i.e. me) even more annoyed than he was to start with. So I've decided that I should follow Thompson's inspiring lead and use my computer skills to the full. I've written a random letter generator, including such choice phrases as 'Woefully inadequate service', 'Pointless waste of space', 'See you in court' and 'As useful as a pair of Plasticene scissors'. The first letters are already winging their way to Thompson and Britannia, under an assumed name. I expect the first computer-generated replies within a week or so, whereupon I shall send the second batch. I wonder who'll get bored first?