Gonged!

I am pleased to tell you that I have got my computer back.

It is not exactly my computer. Everything has been wiped from it, as thoroughly as if it had been visited by an anxious housemaid with a crush on the butler, and for some inexplicably tiresome cyber-reason, it will not re-establish itself.

The Apple lady on the telephone did this. She positioned herself inside my computer and washed everything away.

I am very cross with Apple. Indeed, I do not think I will ever forgive them.

After they had wiped my computer clean they told me that they would send me a box in which it could be delivered to them, so I waited. They did send a box, but not to me. They sent it to the local garage, where it waited for a week whilst I frantically messaged Apple.

In the end I found it, on a Friday afternoon. I packaged the computer in it, and they refused to collect it until Monday. When they did collect it they kept it for a week before sending me an email to say it would cost me seven hundred and fifty quid to get it fixed, and it was my own fault for getting it wet.

I called and emailed, and entered increasingly grumpy messages into their horridly cyber-friendly Chat Box, insisting that I had not got it wet, and that there was some other problem.

In the end I managed to get through to somebody who sounded as though they might be an Indian trying to speak English with an American accent and an attitude of total indifference. She assured me that their technicians were wonderful and any difficulties I had with Apple’s magnificence were entirely due to my own uncooperative paranoia. Eventually she told me that they would just send the computer back to me, unrepaired, which they did, explaining in an enclosed letter that it was wet and there was absolutely and unequivocally no way of fixing it whatsoever, other than, of course, to spend seven hundred and fifty quid. What was more, they added, sanctimoniously, they had worn themselves out trying to contact me but I was unresponsive.

I gnashed my teeth.

By this morning I was in despair.

You will recall that Oliver’s recent driving success has cost us a small – actually a largeish – fortune in insurance, and it seemed that the possibility of ever having a computer again had suddenly become impossibly tiny. Of course I use it almost all of the time, for writing my college work as well as these pages, and I have missed it terribly.

I contemplated my handwritten future with some gloom.

Then I had an inspiration. It may even have been a Divine Inspiration. The Gods can be remarkably helpful when the mood takes them.

I put it in my bag and took it to the computer shop behind the post office in the village. The kindly man behind the counter listened sympathetically and said to leave it with him.

I collected it half an hour later. It was fixed and cost me a tenner.

I am now trying to rediscover everything Apple has wiped off it. This is infuriating, but I don’t care really. I have a computer again, and Apple can jolly well go and get lost. They are utterly unscrupulous rotters and I expect Steve Jobs is spinning in his grave.

In other news, Oliver has occupied the whole day telling us Inspirational Stories about How I Passed My Driving Test. Mark has mostly missed them, because he has been outside in the alley trying to piece his car back together. Lucy has finished her week’s detecting and come home, Oliver’s girlfriend is still isolated in the loft trying to finish an animation that has got to be done, and finally, because it has been announced in the last few minutes and I don’t need to keep it secret any more…

Number One Daughter is getting an MBE in the New Year Honours list.

Hurrah!