Virgin Mobile appears to not exactly have great customer service

Yes, I'm back with the old customer service stories.

So I decided to buy a backup pay-as-you-go phone, as neither of us have phones we can totally rely on (and I hate my HTC Touch Diamond with a passion) and now we're Responsible Grown Ups it seems like the thing to do.

It took an age to find the Virgin Mobile PAYG Tariff and I wanted to know how long your minutes last (as in when do they expire) as we're probably not going to use it that often. So now I've been hung up on three times. Of course, they don't say they're going to hang up on you; they say that they need to put you through to some other department (which when you call back doesn't exist) and put you on hold and eventually you get the "the other person has cleared" message and you know they put in their call centre system that they solved your problem in less than the alloted three minutes or whatever it is, so they can get the extra payment but I can't even find out basic product information.

Something is very rotten in the state of call centres.