I rang them, eventually managed to get past Ada (phone AI) to a human but then got cut off before I'd even managed to explain the problem to the foreign-voiced person.

not knowing why I keep getting cut off - unless it's an ongoing TalkTalk phone line problem.

then tried looking for the online chat app on the Metro website which the male phone-bot had claimed was there before putting me through to the female phone-bot. But it didn't exist anywhere (even on the laptop view) - ie it must be a mobile phone app-only feature and not on the real website at all.

gone back to the telephone line to try again - and, after getting past the phone-bots yet again - I got a somewhat more understandable human. However, it was still a bit of a struggle to get them to understand that I don't have a mobile phone number because there's no usable signal in here.

an alternative method of 2-factor authentication but they don't have one and they don't believe they can put the landline number into the mobile phone field to have their system text a pin code via fake voicing of it (which other banks can do).

at least got through enough of the security to their phone operator to convince them I still exist (ie they don't get to declare me dead and take my money) but I don't have usable access to it.

I also got them to change the email address on my bank account with them so it doesn't keep going to the inaccessible TalkTalk account whenever they imagine they have something important to tell me. Although I don't actually have an email confirmation that they've put the correct address in there. So I may just have made things worse!

find out if I try to contact them by phone again and they can no longer send me a pin code via the difficult-to-reach email and hence won't believe it's me at all (rather like their attempts to text a non-existent mobile phone number which they had made up out of nothing - literally zeroes).

now cold (fire off while I was using its power plug and scrambling around on the floor) & tired of all the fighting with humans & hardware & setup screens.

what the point of telling phone or chat people anything when they always muck it up. I'd said my email address was all in lower case (despite containing initials) so, many hours later, they've sent me an email addressed in all caps instead.

what a nuisance.

if they have a time based one-time Passoword (totp?) which if you can get the "code" you could just run locally. They're sometimes a huge pain, as they tend to timeout after about 30 seconds, meaning times have to be the same...