Never download anything strange from the internet. Never put your credit card details into a site you are unfamiliar with.
Yes, I know. But I was desperate. I couldn’t make my father’s new laptop work and having bought it for him as a gift I was miffed. So I started clicking on all sorts of dangerous-looking icons in an attempt to save face.
In particular, I decided to click ‘Download Microsoft Office now!’ This is because after a cursory examination of the machine I decided that the problem was most likely that, in a moment of blondeness, I had forgotten to install Office when I bought it, and that a free trial of the product had come to an end, thus disabling the system which should store my father’s documents.
‘Stand back, I can fix this,’ I said manfully. ‘No, really,’ I said, as my father tried to argue, ‘I know exactly what’s gone wrong here…I just need to click on this…and this…and put my credit card details in here…’ More protests from my father. ‘…and your address, mobile number and email in here…’ Really quite serious protests. ‘…and there, you see, it’s starting to download.’
And it did start to download. For a while. And then it stopped downloading and the screen froze and I started to scream. My father ran for cover, my mother shut herself in the living room, the cat leapt out of the catflap.
As Kite Towers descended into chaos, the Microsoft Office people started sending baffling messages to my father’s email, detailing strange ‘key’ codes which must be entered into the laptop in a way that was totally unexplained. I left the machine switched on and forbade anyone to go near it, as if it were an angry dog with indigestion that might just belch its way back to health if we left it alone.
After a fitful night’s sleep tortured by feverish dreams of Bill Gates dining out indefinitely on continuous payments of £110 from my Barclaycard, I packed up the laptop to take it back.
At Currys in Fulham, I accosted the first lanky boy in a nylon shirt I could find and informed him hysterically that ‘everything’ had gone wrong. He froze, lost the power of speech and had to be rescued by a passing colleague who said ‘I’ll handle this’ in a way that made me instantly want to share with him all my worldly goods. He was called Matt and he was vastly proportioned but in a way that was not unsexy in the circumstances. It takes a big man to calm me down in a crisis and this was a big man all right. He was as wide as he was tall and had a huge attitude to match.
When I explained the problem, he shook his head and said wearily, ‘Dear, oh dear. Right, I’ll sell you Microsoft Office for the 59 quid it would have cost if you’d bought it with the laptop.’
It was a great offer but I still wanted to understand what had happened the night before. ‘Is it possible,’ I asked, ‘that somewhere inside this computer, the Microsoft Office I paid for exists?’
It was possible, he said with a shrug, and after doing a bit of clicking he issued this explanation of why the product had not installed properly: ‘You bought Microsoft Office 2010 and your laptop is set up with a trial for Microsoft Office 2007 so the key code they’ve given you doesn’t work.’
To me, that sounded like Currys had sold me a laptop with a very old hard drive. But Matt told me that this was a supremely stupid suggestion. He looked really cross, and I feared I was losing him.
So I asked meekly if there was any way he could fix the thing that had gone wrong that was obviously my fault. He sucked air through his teeth and scratched himself: ‘I could, but it will cost you £25.’
‘Yes!’ I cried, slamming my hand down on the counter like Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally. ‘Yes! Yes! Yes! Do it!’
He looked at me with a bored expression, as if women reacted to him like this all the time. I was now looking at a bill of £135 for something that should have cost £59 but I was ecstatic. I even tried to make small talk as he worked, asking him if he had been busy lately, and so on. But he wasn’t interested.
We sat in silence for 20 minutes — me staring at him adoringly and him clicking — and when he had finished he pushed the laptop back across the counter at me and said with extreme disinterest, ‘Do you want anything else?’ ‘No, I said rapturously. ‘You’ve given me everything I need.’
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
Comments