When I received an email from the Co-op telling me they had made a mistake with my car insurance, and I was owed money, I should have been pleased.

I was not pleased. I was terrified. The letter included a reissued no claims discount of nine years, instead of the no years they had reduced me to, which was why I moved to another company.

Lumbered with this Johnny-come-lately apology, I now had to contact my new insurers and try to explain the whole darn nightmare all over again.

And I couldn’t even remember what had happened. Vaguely, I recalled a parking prang some years ago, and the Co-op shooting my premiums up, despite my no claims being protected, and then swapping to Admiral, who gave me an affordable policy despite this.

Was I really going to risk crashing and burning my way through their call centre, battling all kinds of bureaucratic mayhem until my attempt to inform them that my no claims should be higher resulted in me losing the two new years I had built up?

I rang their number with a quaking heart and after a shortish wait a very nice lady I at first presumed to be in India told me, between extremely long and disconcerting delays on the line, that she was going to help me. I didn’t have an online log-in, I told her, as I had not got around to that, so I didn’t know my policy number. After a long pause she said that was fine, she could take my registration number.

She spoke so faintly, and with so much reverb, I now began to wonder whether they had relocated their call centre to a space station orbiting a planet in another solar system.

‘KN10…’ I said loudly, and waited, and there was such a long pause I said: ‘Are you still there?’ at exactly the point she acknowledged me by calling: ‘Kilo… November… 10!’

‘E… V… M…’ I continued. There was another pause so long that after a while I could bear it no longer and called out: ‘Hello? Are you still there?’ and at that precise moment she called out, as though from a million light years away: ‘Echo… Whiskey… Mike!’

I shouted: ‘Not whiskey, no!’ And there was a good ten second pause which I saw to the end this time, biting my lip, before she called: ‘Not whiskey?’

‘Not whiskey!’ I called back. ‘Victor! Echo… Victor… Mike!’ Pause. More pause. Wait. Wait for it.

‘Echo… Victor… Mike!’ called the girl on the international space station.

After that I took a deep breath. Now I had to explain to her how to design a new air filter for her exploded oxygen tank using only spare parts already in the space station.

That was how it felt anyway. In reality, I went through the whole torrid business of how the Co-op had decided to admit that they had made a mistake four years earlier, forcing my premium to be too high, and they were now not only refunding me money but had also enclosed a new backdated no claims discount certificate.

The pause began. I told myself to wait. Wait. Wait for it… There was a crackle from the space station before she called out that I could email it to them at ‘customer sauces’. I thanked her and she said there was one more thing. Wait. Wait. Sounding slightly strangled, and in all likelihood hanging upside down trying to fix the blown oxygen tanks, she asked whether I could complete a survey saying how this call had gone. I said I would. But let’s face it, I’m not going to do that to her.

When I put the phone down, I was about to send the email but decided I really had better check the small print of this policy before I ruin it by trying to make it better. I tried to register for an online account so I could view my policy documents, and got this:

Password must include 12 or more characters, at least one upper case letter, at least one lower case letter, at least one number, at least one special character and not include a percentage (%) or ampersand character (&).

At first I was cross, but then I realised that of course, access to the international space station has to be pretty tight.

For a long time, I could not think of a 12-letter word that I liked enough. An online Scrabble helper did not help. Razzmatazzes, Quizzicality and Blackjacking left me cold.

I fiddled around for an age typing silly words and trying to get the specialness of the special character just right for Admiral.

I settled on Internationalspacestation99# because I might just remember the call centre lady hanging upside down in her astronaut suit when I next want to access my car insurance.