Real life | 28 May 2015

Andy the tech guy looked delighted when I told him I had done the stupidest thing ever. He is one of those whizz kids who hungers for interestingly impossible technological problems. The more obscure the devastation I have wrought to a gadget the better he likes it. He was very excited when I blew the brains out of my laptop by opening 27 windows, then slamming the lid down without closing any of them. On that occasion, he ran a programme called a ‘Defraggler’, which I think must be like a defibrillator for laptops. He licked his lips as I sat down in front of him with the smashed BlackBerry.

‘This is hideously ruined, even by my standards,’ I said, placing the apparently dead phone in front of him.

Not only had I dropped it on the stone floor and smashed it, I explained, I then locked myself out of it and out of the spare BlackBerry I keep in a drawer, by attempting to swap over the Sim card in a botched rescue operation. Since then I had been panicking non-stop about the likelihood of my not being able to get hold of another phone with buttons. Acres of my Facebook page had been given over to friends telling me to calm down on the basis of a) how easy it was to use a touchscreen and b) how easy it was to get hold of a new BlackBerry, which cheered me not at all because I know full well that these new BlackBerrys — when one tracks them down — are enormous, oblong things that make texting about as convenient as if one were trying to do it on a tombstone. Or indeed an iPhone.

I had not even been able to ring Andy at first because his number was only in my old Blackberry Sim, or so I thought.