So the geekie-techie bloke phones up your humble correspondent first thing this morning & tells me

you know when I said that your laptop would be completely repaired & back to you by nine o’clock today, well …

so as sure as new taxes follow the election of a Labour government, with a certain sickening inevitability, a whole litany of binary woes are laid before me. In fact it transpires that my head partition (whatever that might be when it’s a home) is even more corrupt that Ken Livingstone’s re-election campaign & judging by the dead tree media over the last few days, that really does take some doing as it transpires that Red Ken has been receiving more bungs (ooooooooophs, sorry, I meant previously undisclosed campaign donations ) than errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr the rest of the Liebore Party.

OK, fair enough, worse things might happen when you are at sea than your laptop dying on you … but when you guarantee me that something is going to be fixed, call me old fashioned but I expect my laptop to come back fixed & not receive the response that company policy is that

you cant go further than the hard drive

Cant go further than the bl**dy hard drive???? In my admittedly warped & twisted opinion, that’s a little like a young lady checking into the hotel with you & then when you get to the first button of her blouse, suddenly re-discovering her self-esteem. I thought that you had promised me that I was going to get my computer fixed & that in the highly unlikely event that it couldn’t be fixed that I wouldn’t have to pay a penny … not be presented with my still broken machine an invoice for nearly 50 quid.

Anyway, it’s a comparatively new laptop, so it was time to instigate Plan B & I phoned the IBM’s helpline. Whilst this might seem a very sensible course of action, trust me when I say that this is something that you really really don’t want to do unless you are in the office as by the time that you finally get connected to someone that purports to be able to help you, the cost of the call will be larger than than the average investment bank bale out. Again, is it just me or do the people that supposedly ‘work’ in call centres work of geological time scales?

So finally I get put through to Billy (a gentleman of Scottish extraction) & who in a previous existence peddled snake oil because he has a disk that he is going to send me which all I have to do is put it in the disk drive …
chant the mythical incantations …
& all will be made better in less time than it takes young William to get into a fight after seven pints of heavy on a Friday night.

Fantastic says I, & with all the naivety of an undergraduate in a lapdancing bar, I inquire as to whether said disk could be biked round to my office. Oh foolish foolish man … apparently the supply of the magic disks has been outsourced to a company in Bratislava & they take five to ten days to arrive!

All of ‘em, I want them dead … I want all of these people doing the lamppost tango right now. No matter how statistically improbable it may seem, I want them all to suffer debilitating brain aneurisms this morning. If I could buy Ebola from Sainburys I would be buying family packs of it to mail to each & every one of these people. I would be first in the queue at the Post Office when it opens this morning Jiffy packs in hand …. least I would be if the Government hadn’t closed them all down.