My current obsession, however, concerns the subset of computer people who work on the "support" desks of internet service providers. I will not name mine, partly because I have no doubt that yours is just as bad, but largely because I know that they can, while I sleep, ruin my life with a few well-placed keystrokes.
I recently returned from a trip to India, a wonderful country that is home to one sixth of the world's population.
India was, until the Philippines undercut it, the place where the phone was answered when you rang a call centre; Bangalore, where I landed, is one of the major IT hubs of Asia; and internet access is widely available, even if ultra-fast broadband is not - it's mostly copper-wire stuff, but it's pretty reliable and even modest hotels have free wi-fi.
After a few days, in which I had sent and received many emails from the normal service on my iPad, I got a message from my wife, wondering how I was getting on. This was puzzling, since I had received several emails from her, and sent as many. I immediately re-sent them, asking for acknowledgement, but there was silence. So I resorted to sending by Gmail.
My normal email had worked well on previous trips, including to Turkey, to Egypt, to Mongolia, for heaven's sake where the manholes in the pavement have no covers and there are no vegetables, much less internet cafes. But here I was, receiving fine and sending without success.
Making matters faintly worse, was that, very occasionally, it worked: a mass newsy email, sent to a dozen friends and family, was received by my daughter in Italy and my stepson in Te Atatu, but nobody else.
More in sorrow than in anger, I emailed the support people, describing the problem and answering in advance, all the questions I knew they would ask me: yes, the problem occurred almost all the time, but not without exception; it occurred whatever my IP address (it had happened on a Hong Kong stopover, too); it was the same whether I used the "webmail client" (what a nonsensical use of the word "client") or the onboard email; and no, there were no other problems.
That didn't stop them asking me a bunch of other questions and then lapsing into a permanent (and presumably ruminative) silence, despite my occasional prodding. That was October 28. Perhaps they were waiting for the problem to go away, which it did when I got home. They have not been so foolhardy as to send me one of those "How did we do?" customer-satisfaction surveys.
I am bracing myself now for a flurry of shruggingly exculpatory messages from geeks, explaining in terms no normal person could understand, what went wrong and why it was my fault. I ask them this:
Would anyone accept such treatment from an auto serviceman ("I don't know why it has three wheels. What did you do?") or a butcher ("Sometimes meat just smells bad. What can I say?").
And, 25 years after Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal for something called the World Wide Web, which of those three words do they not understand?
