Expectations dashed at Mamas Papas:A pregnant – and decidedly miffed – reader from Dublin 6 got in touch with us after being given the runaround by Mamas Papas, the baby equipment chain.

After a five-year gap, the time has come to “excavate the attic and take down the baby infrastructure” she writes. “Close inspection of the bouncy chair revealed a crust of Weetabix, yogurt and other undefined substances, and my initial plan to cover the cover ended up, like the cover, in the bin.” She figured that as the tubular metal frame was perfectly serviceable, she would just buy a new cover and reckoned that “with the baby-shop boom” this would be easy.

“Not so. At last, though, after trawling the internet, the shops and the phone book, I found an ‘accessory pack’ for the Wave bouncer in Mamas Papas. At €49, it’s around the same price as a cheap bouncer but it’s well padded and washable,” she writes.

She phoned the customer service number and chose the “spare parts” option but after 10 minutes of hold music and “we understand your frustration” blather, gave up and phoned Dundrum Town Centre.

“Unfortunately,” said the woman on the shopping centre switchboard, “Mamas Papas doesn’t have direct lines to its shops but have you got the 1890 customer service number?”

Our reader had the number and she phoned it again. “This time I chose the customer order option. I put the phone on loudspeaker, had a shower, got dressed and was doing some nesting-type jobs when, after 38 minutes, I heard a real person speaking. I said I’d like to check whether the Dundrum branch of the shop had the accessory pack and, if so, could they please reserve it until I could get there to buy it. “Oh I’m sorry,” said the woman in the call centre somewhere in Far, Far Away, “I can’t do that – you need to contact the spare parts line.”

Until that moment, our reader had held it together and had given off an air of a perfectly sane customer with a perfectly reasonable request.

“But then the 30-weeks-pregnant, working-full-time-mother-of-two hormonal maniac burst through the veneer. ‘No,’ I said, suddenly losing my reason. ‘I have been waiting for 38 minutes to speak to a person. Don’t transfer me. Please do this one thing for me. Doesn’t Mamas Papas realise it is selling to pregnant and post-partum women?’ ‘All right,’ she said grudgingly, ‘I’ll check the stock in Dundrum.’ She did, and they had two, and she took a deposit, and all was well, and I regained my sanity and thanked her calmly.”

All was not, however, well. She lugged the frame to Mamas Papas in Dundrum to get the cover and try it for size.

“We don’t have that accessory pack,” said the woman in the shop. Our reader, who by now felt like a hormonal maniac, begged to differ, quoting the order number the woman on the phone had given, and wondering how a deposit could be paid on a non-existent item. “Please don’t make me cry, I said, because I will cry very long and very loudly.”

“I’ll check the stockroom,” said the woman hurriedly, and she did, and she came back with one.

It turns out that since this reader had her last baby, bouncy chair technology has moved on. There’s a new cover and it doesn’t work with her existing frame. She noted however that the new style bouncer comes with a “non-removable harness” which she said – and this stage, she has a good deal of hands-on experience of these things – “must get unspeakably filthy”.

But that’s not a concern for our correspondent as she’s not buying it. “And nor will I buy their €80 bouncy chair. The perfectly good frame of my old bouncy chair went into a skip at the recycling centre the next day. And my friend is lending me a bouncy chair.”

She wants to know why is it so hard to buy such “a patently obviously necessary thing anywhere? Surely my babies are not the only ones who make a mess? And why does Mamas Papas make pregnant women and strung-out parents of infants wait such an interminable time for such mediocre service?”