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Even as I pick it off the shelf, I know it will let me down. I rate the chances of it working no better than 50/50. So why do I buy it, when the dead hand of impending disappointment taps so insistently on my shoulder? I speak of something so simple, so common and so mundane that this must be the very reason we keep buying the wretched things even though at least half the time they don’t work. They’re too trivial to make a fuss about. This must change. We must fight back.

I speak of pump-action dispensers on small plastic vessels of liquid soap, hand creams and a whole range of products that, in most cases, will not end up being dispensed via the dispensers with which they are supplied.

It’s a weird ritual. Even as I take it out of my shopping bag, I feel dismay in anticipation. The pump comes in the “down” position. I must get it to spring to the “up” position so I can press it down to eject the gunk. This ought to be easy. It rarely is. The arrows and the words are cruelly small and ill-defined. I reach for my magnifying glass and find some direct sunlight or a high-wattage bulb and examine the top of the pump with great care. Having identified the recommended direction of twist to pop up the pump, I take a deep breath. This is the moment upon which the whole enterprise hangs. Gingerly, with scant hope and zero expectation, I turn it clockwise. Nothing happens.

In my sinking heart, I know the game is up. But, groping in a fog of futility, I return it to the start position. Nursing a vague notion that I misread the arrow, or that it was misprinted, I turn it in the other direction. Nothing, obviously.

While my hope fades, the speed picks up as I turn, twist and twizzle this way and that, channelling my anger into a hopeless whirl. Then I stop and, with increasing force, try pressing and pulling. Again, nothing. I wonder for the hundredth time if there’s a standard way of doing this – some manoeuvre that everyone knows about but me. Mournfully, I accept I’ve put my money on another nonstarter, a dud. Pump action, my arse. Pump inaction, more like.

Solemnly, as the icy calm of resignation does its sovereign work, I unscrew the so-called pump mechanism. Then I pick up my hammer and smash the bastard to pieces.

I suppose I could have returned it to the shop, but who does that? No one returns to the supermarket with liquid soap in one hand, the receipt in the other and joins the long queue to speak to a human at the customer service desk. No customer stands there and says: “The little thingy doesn’t work; can I have a bar of soap instead?” No one does this – and they know this. And no one, apart from me, is tragic enough to bang on about it. This they also know. So nothing changes.

I wondered if it was just me, but everyone I’ve asked has nodded in sad agreement. I even asked AI and it seemed annoyed, too. I’ve read admiring testaments to the magic of the mechanism, “a simple yet clever combination of a manual pump, a spring and one-way valves to draw soap from the bottle”. Clever, my arse. They. Don’t. Work. Some clever dick somewhere is sitting on a superyacht bought with the proceeds of an invention manufactured millions of times over that causes untold annoyance to humankind. In the sumptuous yacht-bogs on this vessel, you can bet your life there’s no pump-action liquid-soap dispenser.

Enough. No more. Either give us a simple squeezy bottle that works or shove your liquid soap – dispenser and all – where the sun don’t shine. Otherwise, we’ll all go back to bars of soap, with which we never had a problem in the first place.

• Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist