I was on the phone to my bank, as no story that ends well ever begins. I’d had a letter from them announcing, in tones that suggested I was a greater criminal than Pol Pot and Dick Dastardly put together, the discovery of a minor oversight on my part, and that as a result they were closing the account I have had for 45 years. 

We had a long chat, the woman who was pleasant, if not overly burdened with immediate comprehension skills, and I, and in the end agreed that there was nothing she could do, nothing anyone could do, and maybe I could try a novena or something because beyond divine intervention, y’know – life just happens.

I resolved to ring back later and find, as the writer Caitlin Moran once termed it, “a Janet” – a middle-aged woman who has seen all, knows all, can sort all. They’re still there. It just takes longer to locate one. When the last Janet dies, it should be an occasion of national mourning, modelled on the passing of the last soldier of the First World War. It won’t be. But it should.

I digress. The point is – at the end of this unrewarding call, when she asked if there was anything else she could do for me today, I said “Yes. Could you order me a new cash card please. I have lost mine.”

“You can do that through the app,” she said.

“Do you mean you can’t order me a new card? Here, now?” I asked.

“I can,” she said. “But you can do it through the app. I can walk you through it if you like.”

“Please order me a new card here, now,” I said, in calm, neutral tones, because the world is a raging binfire but it is not her fault.  

Nothing, nothing makes me madder these days than companies trying to push back onto me tasks that were, up until about 10 minutes ago, very much within the purview of the people charging me money – directly or indirectly – to provide “a service”. I already have a job, you see. It takes up quite a bit of time, I already fill in a lot for my husband and child and their extended periods of holiday and sick leave, and if I have to do everyone’s else’s jobs as well, the maths doesn’t work.

It’s an insidious practice, this offloading of work and responsibility onto those who should be least required to handle it. It also has a name: prosumerism. It’s Latin for “make everything harder and worse”. Prosumerism’s first notable incursion into daily life was perhaps the advent of the self-service till. Where once there would have been a person to scan your items, check with their eyes how old you were, tell you with words that you couldn’t buy three packets of bastard paracetamol, rolls aforementioned eyes with you at the insanity, provide you with bags, help you navigate loyalty cards, help you open the bastard bags, even give you a little help in packing them if queues allowed it, was now virtually all on you.

Now we are expected to print out our postage labels, our airline tickets, take our own meter readings and send them to the supplier, virtually become our own lawyers if we want to pursue an insurance claim, and our own police force if we want a minor incident or theft investigated (I’m thinking of the recent story about the couple who tracked their air-tagged bikes to a precise location in the absence of any police response, but then couldn’t even get an officer to come out and take the bikes back for them, though they were warned against the possible illegality of doing so themselves) and so on and dementingly on.

It is exhausting to have to do so much and, as the mission creep from commercial entities to institutional has gone on, to feel so abandoned and exposed to forces beyond what it is really feasible for individuals to tackle. And now, with the Government’s new advice, in the utter absence of any kind of concerted national plan for mitigation and protection, that we all start stockpiling basic supplies against the day when (there doesn’t seem to be as much sense of “if” accompanying the instructions as you’d hope) Britain is hit by a disaster, we appear to be plumbing new depths.

For what is this abdication of government responsibility but prosumerism taken to an absurd, unhealthy, frankly immoral degree? Corporate cost-saving skulduggery is one thing. But this is quite another.

We need a wholly furious, resounding, collective, unignorable NO to facing the apocalypse with nothing more than a spare family pack of beans and some hand sanitiser under the stairs while our overlords sit back and consider their job done. A government full of Janets, that’s what we need. The fightback starts here.