Should you wish to pay off the bulk of your Egg credit card balance, you'll be advised by the bank's call centre to send in a cheque.

A week later, when you attempt to use your card to pay off a paltry £250 hotel bill, having sent a measly £10,000 cheque to reduce your balance, you'll find that it takes a stonking ten days for a cheque to be cleared, so you can't pay the bill.

And because you've just forked out ten big ones to pay off your credit card, you no longer have funds available in your current account to write a cheque.

How exactly does it take ten days to clear a cheque in these days of E-commerce and Internet whiz-bangery?

"No idea," is the somewhat unhelpful response from Egg call centre supervisor Catherine Shaw-Something-or-Other on extension 10536 at the Derby call centre, "it could be something to do with HSBC."

In the meantime, the plucky Egg user has the not-inconsequential worry of whether £10,000 of their hard earned cash is slowly wending its way through Egg's pigeon post or if it has instead found its way into the pocket of a Columbian drug lord with a somewhat less-tenuous grasp on the whiles of the Internet than that of Egg's web masters and mistresses. ®