Sue Pycroft

We own the company between us, and despite our secret penchant to act like outrageous, debauched reprobates, we actually run it like a couple of grownups, and tend to be rather meticulous about keeping records and paying bills and boring stuff like that.

My younger teenage self would have cringed if she’d known that I’d eventually turn into a tax-compliant, law-abiding citizen – but there you go. I have.

The phone call is about the letters that Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs or Inland Revenue keep on sending us. It not only says that we haven’t paid our corporation tax, which is a big, big fib, but it says that if we don’t pay today we run the risk that they’ll send round The Boyz.

This is an unsavoury enough prospect in itself. But they write this every fortnight. And every fortnight we contact them and prove we have paid, and they say, oh, yes, we know, sorry, just ignore it. And then two weeks later, another letter drops through our letter box, and we start again.

To be honest, this process of repeatedly reminding them that liars run the risk of setting their pants on fire, should only take 15 minutes or so, and even then you could read all your emails or clear out your desk drawers while you wait in the call centre queue. But each fortnight it takes longer and longer.

And today something’s snapped. This is so not right. This is a waste of public money – and of ours. Some of that hard-earned tax we paid is going towards paying someone to write us a letter which is incorrect and some more on the salary of someone to confirm that it’s incorrect. I’ve suddenly had an Alice in Wonderland moment. The world is mad. We need to start getting cross.

Luckily, my colleague does cross without sounding too cross very well. I just sound like I’m hyperventilating.

Obviously, I can only hear her side of the conversation, but it’s clear that she’s not getting what she wants – the cessation of the letters, and perhaps even an apology.

She puts the phone down and breathes out slowly. Well, a manager is going to phone us back. They can’t say when, and they can’t say who, because they don’t give out names. We’ve given them our names though, she says. And address. And dates of birth. And company number. It seems just a bit odd that we can’t know theirs.

I can almost hear the body of George Orwell twitching in his grave.

The unknown tax manager does, to our surprise, ring back later in the afternoon. Yes, he understands it’s annoying to get these letters when we have paid our tax. No, he can’t do anything about it whatsoever, unfortunately.

My colleague puts forward the radical suggestion that he stops the computer from generating any more. The sound of sharply indrawn breath carries across the telephone wires and lands in an office in Swindon.

That, he says, would mean a total rewrite of the software. A total rewrite.

We both feel as if we’ve said a rude word in company.

So computer says no, says my mate. That’s about it, says the harassed civil servant.

I used to worry about Trident. I used to worry about climate change. But now I worry that countless other law-abiding small companies also make the same calls twice a month and still a government department spends money on electricity to power the deranged computer, and on paper, envelopes and postage, and then on some poor sod (and his boss) to tell us to ignore it all because the software doesn’t work. It probably doesn’t add up to a hill of beans in terms of the GDP.

But it would be better spent on almost anything else. I’ll leave you to fill in whether that should be teachers, or nurses, or some essential medical treatment, or an extra bed in a hospital.

I’m just going to have a lie down.