I feel like my fingers have been taken away. I’m imagining phantom sensations, like I’m typing on the keyboard and words are coming out, but nothing is appearing on the screen. Same on the phone. I’m talking for hours on end, and nobody hears. Three days now I’ve been sitting on the phone to helpdesks all around the world. I’ve been on to Apple to sort out an iMac that I want to return to the shop. Long story that, not for here. I’ve been on to Apple again about my wife’s iPad which isn’t working at all. First phone call was cut off, and they called back on the wrong number, as I found out when the second call was also cut off, while luckily there was screen sharing in place and we were able to correct it by typing on screen. The day before, the screen sharing terminated three times until the man on the other end lowered the resolution till he could barely discern what he was looking at. And yesterday, when I got off the phone to Apple, I was then forced to call my security people, because the advice I had received from the so-called installation ‘expert’ who messed up the new iMac led me to inherit a new virus which seems to be able to read everything I do on my computer. Another three hours on the phone, and when the chap on the other end got fed up with being unable to fix the problem, he referred me to a number to call after he put the phone down for their virus removal team. Funny looking number I thought, and said so. Freedial, he said, is it in the uk I said, Philippines he said, do you know the international dialling code for the Philippines, then radio silence, then I repeat my question and he gives me a London number, the same one I called him on. Haven’t managed to contact them yet, because in the middle of that, my wife’s iPad stopped functioning, which brings us back to the beginning. And where I’m at with that, is that after about an hour on the phone, the third time this morning, we’ve managed to uninstall iTunes on my PC, because it wasn’t recognising the iPad. As reinstalling it the way they want me to is a five-step process which takes a while, it has been left up to me to do, and I am waiting for a call back at 2 pm so that they can continue problem solving. But actually they have caused a problem, because all they have done is remove a program from my computer, and then emailed me instructions in a format that Windows can’t read, so when they call back I won’t have reinstalled and we’ll have to start all over again. Which means I still won’t have dealt with the virus problem on the PC, which I wouldn’t have had if I hadn’t listened to the bloke who came to install an iMac, which he didn’t do right, and which I can’t use and is going back to the shop. So here I sit, me and the computer, both with viruses,mine being continuing shingles, and neither of us with a particularly favourable prognosis. Plus the iPad, which won’t connect to the server, has an irrevocable hissy fit if we try to disconnect and reconnect the wi-fi, and locks up at random if we go near anything on the screen that begins with a ‘w’. Like wi-fi.