I'm as mad as hell... any chance of a free voucher? You see, for the past three weeks, my boiler has been doing its best imitation of Schrödinger's cat - not exactly working, but not exactly not working. Each time we turned on the tap, there would be the same tiny eddy of heat, a little moment of thermal indeterminacy. After several agonising seconds, this would gradually develop into either piping hot, lukewarm or stone cold water, depending on which particular tap it was, the time of day, the phase of the moon, and numerous other factors far beyond human control. "But the website says you're open around the clock," I said. "The firm's got '24/7" in its email address." "Yeah," he said. They probably shouldn't have done that. Then he apologised, suggested I turn the heating off and on again, and call them back on Monday. And this is what has me steaming (now that I've got the hot water back). It's not so much that I was stung for several hundred quid by a gang of cowboys. It's the deception, the way that so many firms these days seem to treat the consumer as a sucker, a mark, the equivalent of the guy who sits down at a high-stakes poker game in Vegas and asks whether the aces are worth one or 11. For example, have you taken a London taxi recently? If so, you may have noticed one of the new Visa machines - which offers you the choice of three different tips, each ludicrously generous. You have to navigate to another screen, under the driver's reproachful gaze, before you get to the option for "Thanks, but this was quite expensive already." And don't get me started on how restaurants hiked service charges to 12.5 per cent, and made them automatic - an old wound, but still a raw one. Even some apparently quite respectable names can't resist pulling a fast one. Being paid-up members of the John Lewis classes, my girlfriend and I recently experimented with stocking the fridge via Ocado. We didn't have any complaints about the quality, or even inappropriate substitutions of items that weren't in stock, a common bugbear. But we were pretty cheesed off at being repeatedly lumped with all the produce that was approaching its use-by date, leaving us with a week's worth of meat and two days to eat it in. So we tried Waitrose instead - only to get some burgers that expired pretty much on the evening of delivery. I appreciate that this isn't exactly the equivalent of having to live for a week on benefits, à la Iain Duncan Smith - it is, in fact, pretty much the definition of a First World Problem. But it still felt annoying and shabby and tacky, the sort of thing that drives you, rip-off by rip-off, towards that Network moment where you throw open the window and cry to the world: "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this any more!" Except that, being British, we instead sent a polite email asking for a partial refund, or at least some kind of voucher. Then we went back to turning the heating off and on, in the hope that if we maybe started the kitchen tap running, it might somehow coax the shower back into life.