Mark Andrews: Why we're all being driven to phone rage

Nothing and no-one ever riles me. Well, ok, Liverpool and Man United fans from Surrey, obviously. And people who talk in acronyms, or sign off letters with their preferred pronouns at the bottom. And traffic wardens. But everyone hates them, so it doesn't really count.

Most of the time I'm like James Bond, John Steed, or Bodie out of The Professionals. Cool, calm and always in control. I never, ever lose my rag.

Only this week I did. And it was a phone call that made me do it. Well probably about the 10th call in 24 hours. After endlessly being disrupted by those annoying 'abandoned' calls where as soon as you pick up the phone the line goes dead, I finally got the joys of actually hearing from the source .

"We. Are calling. About your Am-a-zonne account," said the recorded message in robotic English. "Please press one, otherwise you will be charged £600."

Obviously, it was a scam, these calls always are, and I am sick to the back teeth of them.

This pressure cooker had actually been slowly building up since I first started working from home in March last year. At the time I was suffering from quite unpleasant coronavirus symptoms, which meant walking downstairs to the phone left me breathless for a good 10-15 minutes. Yet despite being registered with the Telephone Preference Service, which is supposed to screen out all unwanted phone calls, the dog and bone never stopped barking. And every time, at least when the call was not abandoned, it was either somebody purporting to be from my internet supplier, or about my non-existent Amazon Prime account, threatening me with all sorts of consequences if I didn't immediately connect to some dodgy premium-rate phone line.

Is there no honour among nuisance callers any more? At least in the good old days, when they told you how you were eligible for compensation for an accident you never actually, had or the PPI policy you never took out, at least you could turn the tables on them by asking them questions about which incident they were referring to, or which credit agreement you had supposedly taken out. This usually resulted in them hanging up on me, although there was one particularly charming gentleman who said he hoped I choked on my lunch. Alternatively, if you were in a creative mood, you could always take the phone into the bathroom and flush the toilet next to the mouthpiece. Or play Foster & Allen's greatest hits at deafening volume. I guarantee they won't call back after that.

But you can't do any of this when it's just a recorded message. It's just not Queensbury rules.

On a more serious note, it has been suggested that one of the reasons why the NHS track-and-trace system proved so ineffective was that people were so fed-up with these endless scam phone calls that they stopped answering their phones. So these chancers are not just ripping off the vulnerable and wasting our time, they are also putting lives in danger. Foster & Allen is too good for them.

Anyhow, this time they had well and truly bitten off more than they could chew. In a fit of rage I smashed the phone receiver into tiny pieces, punched a hole in the wall, and threw the microwave out of an upstairs window.

At least I felt like doing all that. What I actually did was dial 1471and write the number that called me on the back of a letter from the building society.

Armed with this information, I dialled the Action Fraud hotline to report what was clearly a scam phone call. After punching several buttons into the phone from one of those infuriating 'press one for this, press two for that' menus, I was on hold for 15 minutes, during which time I was repeatedly told by a recorded voice that I would be hanging on forever, and would really be better of reporting the matter online. So I went onto the Action Fraud website, where I was invited to open an account – really? – or alternatively I could report the matter as a 'guest'.

But the strangest thing of all is the process you have to go through in order to report a fraud online. As soon as you start, you are asked for all sorts of personal details, including your full name, address, and date of birth – exactly what Action Fraud warns you not to share with anyone.

No wonder those scam messages keep coming. It's enough to make me lose my temper.