As a child, I never pictured the adult "me" journeying to other planets and having a fantastic time of it. Instead I pictured myself dying in a nuclear inferno. The future me was a screaming skeleton decorated with chunks of carbonised flesh and the occasional sizzling hair. Not really someone you'd have round for dinner.

Still, at least my premonition suggested I'd live an exciting life, albeit a short one. The reality is less spectacular. I never pictured myself as I was last week: a fully grown adult: alive, yet slowly losing the will to live while attempting to buy a washing machine from a high-street electrical retailer.

Let's be clear about this. Buying a washing machine is not the stuff dreams are made of. It's not a device you're going to fall in love with. It's a white box with a round mouth you shove dirty pants into. Hardly a new member of the family, unless you're a troupe of extreme performance artists.

Buying a mobile phone is easier than buying a washing machine because some phones have the decency to look ugly, thereby simplifying the decision-making process. Washing machines all look the same. Some eat bigger loads or have a more complex array of pre-wash options: whoopee doo. Some doubtless perform better than others: I wouldn't know. Bet it's all a con. Bet there's only one type of washing machine in the world, and they're all shipped from the same warehouse in slightly different packaging and sold at randomly generated prices.

I buy washing machines the same way I order wine in a restaurant: avoid the very cheapest on the basis that it'll be nasty, avoid the second cheapest on the basis that it's probably even worse, avoid the expensive options at the top of the list on the basis that they can't possibly be worth it, and wind up randomly picking something from the middle instead.

Just to make you feel even more uncertain about buying one, they don't have proper names. Once you strip the familiar manufacturer trademarks away, all you're left with is a meaningless series of model numbers chosen specifically to confuse you. Did you order a BD4437BX or a BD3389BZ? Face it: you have no idea. Ring up to place an order and it sounds as if you're discussing chemical weapon formulae. This is why buying a washing machine never feels "real". If you walk around Battersea Dogs Home, brown-eyed puppies with names such as Timbo and Ookums softly yelp for your attention. Walk around Comet and you're confronted by a wall of emotionless monoliths with incomprehensible names. And that's just the staff!!!!!??!!!!?!

I got caught in a high-street retail delivery trap recently; one of those Kafkaesque scenarios in which you pay for something on the basis that it will arrive at a certain time, only to find out it won't, and soon you're sucked into a spiral of helpline calls and telephone keypad options and complaints and counter-complaints until eventually you realise that you're both in a loveless relationship; needing each other, hating hate each other, revolving for hours in a weepy embrace, listlessly kicking at one another's shins.

But this time something new and modern happened. Shortly after one of our bitter rows, while waiting for them to call back, I went on Twitter (yes, bloody Twitter) and angrily compared the Currys electrical retail chain to the Nazis. The next day a mysterious message arrived with a number for me to call; this turned out to belong to one of their heads of PR, who'd spotted my outburst and tracked down my contact details. It's a bit embarrassing when you find yourself talking to someone high up in a company you've loudly and publicly likened to the Third Reich only the night before. Fortunately for me, she was polite and savvy enough not to mention it. Instead she quickly sorted out my complaint, which is the closest I've ever come to feeling like a VIP, or Michael Winner. Nice for me, annoying for anyone reading about it who hasn't been afforded that kind of treatment, ie, you. Perhaps, if I was principled, I'd have yelled "I demand to be treated as a regular customer!" and slammed the phone down. But I didn't.

Still, if buying a big boring box from a big boring shop is a harrowing experience, isn't it time retailers were honest about it? There's no point in pretending to be fun, happy-go-lucky institutions. We're British. We know the truth and we can handle it. Dixons is running a campaign describing itself as "the last place you want to go", which is meant to be a clever reference to its low prices (ie, go and look at it in Harrods, then buy it from us), but effectively describes every electrical retail chain I've ever visited.

Someone needs to go further and launch a chain called Shambles, where all the familiar shortcomings are actively promoted as part of the "experience". The staff wear ironic dunce caps and vulture costumes; if you want to actually buy something, they walk to a stockroom 10 miles away in a neighbouring county to check its availability, methodically harass you into taking out five-year cover using a subtle combination of CIA "extraordinary rendition" psychological techniques and unashamed sulking, then arrange for it to be delivered at 7am by a surly man who'll arrive 10 hours late on purpose, deliberately bring a BD4437BX instead of the BD3389BZ you ordered, attach a magic hidden "hobbling" device that causes it to malfunction immediately before the next bank holiday weekend, screw your partner, scare your kids, wreck your life, and break wind on your doorstep as he's leaving. All of which is heavily advertised as an integral part of the service.

It'll be miserable. But at least you'll enter the transaction with your eyes wide open.