Virgin Media review: I would sooner entrust my communications to a carrier pigeon with terminal paramyxovirus than to Virgin Media.

Virgin Media is, without exaggeration, the worst company I have ever had the misfortune to deal with. It is difficult to decide which aspect of the experience is more impressive: the unreliability of the equipment, the uselessness of the booking system, the engineers who fail to appear, the promised repairs which evaporate into thin air, or the almost impenetrable call centre apparently designed to prevent customers from obtaining anything resembling help.

Nothing works properly, nobody appears to know what anybody else is doing, and promises are handed out with all the permanence of writing on water. You can spend an absurd amount of time explaining the same problem repeatedly to different people, receiving solemn assurances that something has been arranged, only to discover later that absolutely nothing has happened.

What makes the experience particularly contemptible is not merely incompetence. Plenty of companies make mistakes. It is the extraordinary impression Virgin Media gives that inconvenience to the customer is simply somebody else's problem. There appears to be no meaningful ownership of complaints, no continuity, no accountability and precious little urgency. The customer is left to chase them, telephone them, repeat himself, wait for appointments and generally perform unpaid administrative labour for the company, in the forlorn hope that Virgin Media might eventually provide the service for which it is already taking money.

Their customer-service system deserves particular recognition as a masterpiece of corporate obstruction. If somebody deliberately set out to construct a system intended to exhaust a customer until he simply surrendered, I am genuinely unsure what Virgin Media would need to change. Getting a straightforward problem resolved becomes an endurance test involving queues, transfers, loud requests for someone to speak up because the transmission is failing, repetition, contradictory information and assurances which repeatedly prove worthless.

And then there are the engineers and appointments. An appointment with Virgin Media seems less like an arrangement between two parties and more like a vague aspiration. You organise your day around them; they apparently regard attendance as an optional extra. If an engineer does not arrive, the burden somehow falls upon you to begin the entire miserable process again.

There is something almost impressive about the completeness of the failure. It is not merely that one department is bad, or that one piece of equipment is unreliable. Every stage seems capable of failing independently of every other stage, while simultaneously ensuring that the customer has the maximum possible difficulty getting anybody to take responsibility for any of it.

In our case, the hardware has broken down badly enough to require an engineer four times in six months. That would already be an appalling record. Add unreliable appointments, unreliable promises and atrocious customer service, however, and Virgin Media somehow manages to turn simple technical failures into a prolonged administrative punishment.

In the name of God, avoid this company if you have any realistic alternative. I would not recommend Virgin Media to somebody I mildly disliked. I would hesitate to recommend it to somebody who had keyed my car.

They have managed the remarkable feat of combining unreliable hardware, unreliable appointments, unreliable promises and atrocious customer service into one seamless experience of exasperation. At least the highwayman called Turpin (this imbecilic interface won't let me type his actual known name) had the common decency to wear a mask while he robbed people blind.

A whole one star only because Trustpilot apparently declines to provide a smoking crater where the stars used to be.