I'm sure I've spent 4 hours trying to get through.

Didn't help.
An hour's wait certainly used to be "typical", half an hour was a really good day. Thankfully I've had little cause to ring tech support recently.
I object to having to pay for a nice long phonecall to try and argue with someone at NTL that they seem to have flipped that magic switch that sets my account to "not working". Whilst being told several dozen times to toggle random dialup settings reboot my machine etc.