It was the first week in March and, like everyone else in the office, I had flu. Unlike everyone else, I'd had the same flu for months. I decided to take a holiday as soon as possible, and I became part of the hysterical 110,000 late holiday shoppers who each week queue in travel agencies, argue with telesales staff, or click angrily at Internet icons, hoping to find a fortnight in some far-flung paradise.

My first port of call was the Internet. I began filling in boxes specifying when, how much and where, expecting to find the ideal holiday. Expedia.co.uk was quite easy to use and relatively fast. But the results were depressing. Fourteen nights in Tunisia may have cost about £350, but the temperature would seldom have exceeded 16 C. For nearly the same price there was also a fortnight in Lanzarote. But what vexed me was the sheer lack of choice. I moved off to Lastminute.com. It had a few special offers - great deals, average places, nothing suitable - and wanted to send me to Tunisia again. Bargainholidays.com had the biggest selection. It offered the same Tunisia holiday, plus a delectable fortnight in St Lucia for £1,500. I say delectable, but the main problem with these online holidays is that you invariably have little more to go on than the price and location, plus any star rating it might have been arbitrarily awarded.

Most websites offer a little paragraph of brochurese and a low resolution image to persuade you to hand over your credit card details. I had to go elsewhere to find out the weather in each destination, and to see exactly where and what would be my accommodation. All in all, the Net experience gave me information, but no holiday: it didn't get me what I wanted. Perhaps there are plenty of people out there who are hugely satisfied with the service that the dotcom travel agents provide. But perhaps they're missing a little something along the way ...

So I turned to an old friend, the telephone. It seemed that the same frustrating lack of choice was in evidence when I called First Choice. It had only a couple of ideas, and I left empty- handed. I tried the other well-known travel agents, asking their telesales staff how they might be able to help. Their responses were polite, but invariably not helpful enough.

I began to suspect that my concept of late holidays was warped, and that I was simply spoilt. Surely the late holidays industry had thrived because it satisfied people's desires, not their desperation? Do a third of holidaymakers really go for deals as dubious as two weeks in Tenerife, with overcast weather and low temperatures, for £400 a head, and your accommodation allocated when you hit the airport tarmac?

I pushed on. It got to three days before my departure, and I had tried everything. Finally, I took the unorthodox step of calling up Lastminute.com's telesales support line, having seen a holiday that nearly matched my increasingly unfussy requirements.

I spoke to a helpful woman called Melanie who said, yes, the holiday I wanted was available, as the website had said. Would I like to book it? Before taking the plunge, I did something quite wild. I asked her if she might look on her computer to see if there was anything better on offer. This, of course, broke all the rules of e-commerce: I was asking a person to do the job a machine and website had been heavily funded and hyped to do.

But the gamble paid off. Melanie took my requirements, and entered them into her computer. Up came a fortnight in Antigua that left a day earlier than was ideal, but cost only £949, including flights, food and drink and accommodation. She saw that the holiday nearly met my requirements and asked if it would do. It did.

All the technology and innovation just wasn't up to the job. I was left asking myself, after all the faith I had put in the Net, the revolutions of telesales and the information age and all that, why I still had to ring up a human being to get what I wanted. Was it because she could understand the situation I was in?