I know, when you call helplines, there is a certain level of low expectations to be had. You know you’re going to be:

a) put on hold. Sometimes indefinitely.
b) asked a number of inane questions so that they can understand you so that you can understand them so that they can understand you.
c) transferred to multiple people so that you can go through a) and b) over and over again.
d) asked to be called back because they don’t have the answers immediately on-hand.
e) never be called back.

But you don’t expect this from the Corporate Communications department of a government statutory board who is presumably rich enough to hire good corp-comms staff, having recently blessed the nation’s digitally creative with half a billion dollars with which to play.

For every question I asked, the girl on the other line covered the mouthpiece to relay my question to someone else who must have been brilliant but communicating exclusively in sign language or had taken an oath of silence, because why didn’t she just pass the bleeping phone to her, instead?

And, I’m sorry to tell you all, she had what sounded like sticky hands. Or a sticky handset. Because each time she covered and uncovered the mouthpiece, you got a loud schhhhlp ringing in your ears, before her next word.

Finally, she too grew tired of the message-passing, decided to take all my questions down and promised to call me back. Which, naturally, she didn’t.

Though I must say, I thought her last answer to my final question was the most logical I’ve yet to hear from her: “Acherly right, you can googer the answer,” she said.

Of course. Googer. I should’ve gone with that, rather than ask a highly-paid, hopefully well-qualified corporate communications manager of a government agency what it was her agency did. Why do it the hard way, after all?