According to Mrs P this usually leads to a lengthy tirade on the evils of technology and an expression of longing for the good old days when if something stopped working you just thumped it really hard on the top.
It was so much easier than understanding a technology expert on the phone who sounds like he's 12 and may as well be talking from a planet far, far away. Uranus, perhaps.
I say Uranus because (apart from the meaning I'm trying to convey in that previous paragraph) it is, as I understand it, a cold, icy place.
And cold and icy is what I was faced with the other week while driving south on business along the Desert Rd.
Luckily, my multinational employers had saved enough on Pak 'n Save petrol discounts and I got a nice shiny new four-wheel-drive vehicle for the journey.
It has to be said my vehicle purchases in recent years have been of the Japanese import variety, which have included some interesting features.
I am, for instance, familiar with a Japanese voice saying "wakashidishko" continually while reversing.
What that means I have no idea. It could be saying: "You plonker. You've bought a lemon," but I'm sure you get the picture.
So, here I am driving south happily in a nice feature-laden rental car and I've got the radio on. And it's filling me with a sense of foreboding. The Desert Rd is bad. Winter driving conditions. Extreme care needed.
At Turangi a local assures me there's nothing to worry about. "Yeah, nah, she's right," I believe was the exact terminology. Regardless, I felt sufficiently confident enough in my new chariot to challenge the beast.
Fifteen minutes up the road, with ice and snow everywhere, I ground to a halt. Truck stuck on an icy hill.
Twenty minutes later it's clear, and we (me and the 20 or so other vehicles) can start our engines. So I do. And up on the dashboard comes a bright, shiny symbol of a car basically, well, going over a cliff.
Now don't get me wrong. I'm all for sensible warnings on the dashboard. But a symbol of a car going over a cliff is not exactly what you want to see when you are driving in dangerous winter conditions requiring extreme care.
I half expected a Japanese voice to emerge from the dashboard saying "wakashidishko". Translation: "You are now driving over a cliff".
Anyway, I crawled to Waiouru and the comparative sanity of a garage where a young lady of about 16 took pity on me and explained what the symbol was.
As I'd turned the ignition my knuckle had brushed some hidden switch and I'd turned the downhill breaking assistance on. It turns out this is actually quite useful.
Her bemused look also suggested I might need an eye check soon. The "cliff" was in fact just a steep hill.
Anyway. It seems I'm not the only one suffering the techno blues lately.
Take my beloved the other night.
It has taken me a while but I finally persuaded her that a vegetarian pizza for tea would be acceptable to Dr Libby and all other members of the Well Woman Sisterhood.
Ordering from the on-line menu she discovered the "no sauce" option didn't work. In fact it confirmed arrogantly that a sauce would be used. Mrs P battled back and pressed the no sauce option again. Same result.
This went on for some time until, in the end, I got fed up, went to the pizza place and said (wait for it) "No sauce please". Simple.
And nobody in a far off Asian country needed to get out of bed to change the rubber band.
Kevin Page has been a journalist for 34 years. He hasn't made enough money to retire after writing about serious topics for years so he's giving humour a shot instead.
