It's the option we would all kill for during infuriating calls to customer service lines. "Press 5 to circumvent the paralysing incompetence and delay you are experiencing." Unfortunately we can't, because Mumbai call centre hell is the great leveller – unless you've got enough Twitter followers to jump the queue.
Labour's Stella Creasy, having some trouble with her building society last night, offered up this gem:
Creasy wasn't talking to Halifax, otherwise she would have put their Twitter handle at the beginning of the tweet, limiting its audience to people who follow both (presumably very few). She was using her 24,000 followers as leverage. It's the new "don't you know who I am?", and just as cringeworthy.
If an MP threatened their bank manager with a whinging email to constituents unless they got good service, it would be considered out of order. This isn't so different. MPs can sample the impotence we all feel at the hands of automated phone lines, box-ticking operatives and unanswered tweets.
It's unquestionably legitimate for her to use this method in her admirable campaign against legal loan-sharks. And no one would begrudge an MP using Twitter to take on a company on behalf of their constituents. But it's odd how often they choose to speak up on the very day they feel the brunt of poor services.
As it happens, Creasy got the company's user name wrong and directed her grandstanding at an inactive account with no power to reply or expedite her case. Which is how it normally works.
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