Last updated 13:27, Thursday, 29 May 2008

FOR a quarter of a century, I managed my working day without recourse to a computer.

How things have moved on since the days of the typewriter and copypaper was forcefully brought home last week.

When my hard-pressed PC crashed and burned, I was bereft.

The machine, pedestrian at the best of times, seemed to be taking even longer than usual to fire itself up.

It made the usual squeaks and groans, lights flashed impressively, but like the little car in the 1960s tele-vision advert, simply refused to start.

With a sigh, I rebooted the machine, as I believe the technical term is, and then felt like booting it again when it failed to pass go.

It frequently ticks me off, it has to be said, with curt notes which flash up stating “You have made a procedural error” or “You cannot drop items on the task bar” and I’m sure I can occasionally detect a “thicko” amidst all the internal churning.

This time, it went into a prolonged sulk, before flashing up a message that it was going to self-medicate.

Nothing happened, so I had to summon the office IT man, who made several of those teeth sucking and sharp intake of breath noises you never want to hear from a man in overalls.

“You have everything on here backed up, don’t you,” he inquired confidently, and his expression grew even more lugubrious when I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders.

I don’t do electrical things, you see; I don’t know an ohm from an amp, a transistor from a capacitor or an electrode from a commode.

Three years of grammar school physics completely passed me by, despite the best efforts of the irascible Mr Rowlands to instil even the basics of kinetic energy and quantum thingies into my baffled bonce.

While everyone was making doorbells and bouncing radio messages off Jodrell Bank, I was struggling to get the battery into my new fangled electronic calculator.

I own an electronic clock from France, accurate to within a second a millennium, but it is permanently an hour fast, because I don’t know how to alter it each spring and autumn.

I used to have to wait until one of the kids came in from school to set the video, and could never get the dynamo on my bicycle to work either.

Back at the desk, things were looking grim, as the IT man sucked on his screwdriver, and said things that sounded like bifurcated trunnion malfunction, meltdown of the Siberian hamster giga wheel, or stagnation of the inter-costal grommet gaiters, or some such technical talk.

Trying not to look entirely dim, I ventured that it might be something to do with the keyboard, as I had given it the Hextol health check earlier in the week.

This involved turning it upside down, and banging it smartly on the desk a couple of times, which produced an avalanche of crumbs and bits of the Vale of Mowbray growler they stopped making just after the war.

He shook his head, as he did when I proffered the mouse, the little ball of which doesn’t so much roll as judder, as it is coated with the juice from 100 blood oranges and a Calippo, not to mention the yolk from a runny egg sandwich I had the other day.

With a delicate shudder, he said whilst my treatment of ancillary bits of computer equipment was not to be recommended, the problem was in the box.

By now, he had separated the telly thing and the box it stands on, and when he prised open the box it issued more dust than Indiana Jones disturbed when breaking into the tomb of the Inca warlords.

When the motes settled, and the coughing stopped, he was busy giving the machine its last rights, the computer equivalent of whacking a dead Pope on the head three times with a silver hammer.

“It will have to go away to be repaired,” he said.

“But what about all the stuff I’ve saved on it?” I quavered, as reality dawned.

“I’ve got my WI and Rotary speeches, photographs of my family, quizzes I’ve compiled and other stuff I’ve been working on – I’ll be able to get them back, won’t I?”

He gave a hollow laugh, which seemed to indicate I have as much chance of re-trieving my vital information as I have of seeing Lord Lucan riding Shergar down Fore Street.