A technology day

Started the day sufficiently bored and idle to think that perhaps I ought to check the state of affairs with my Virgin Money account, the sad remnant of my Northern Rock account. Down to the PC, fire everything up, enter my user name and press the large red button. Nothing happens. Close Chrome and try again. Still nothing happens and I get into the very long list of contact numbers. By the time that most of them start up - 0800 - I had lighted on one that looks reasonably likely and try it, and, to be fair, in fairly short order I get through to a pleasant young lady. I explain my problem, she thinks for a bit, then 'is it OK if I call you by your first name', then 'can you see the large green start button at the bottom left of your screen'. No, I say, wondering what she is on. What has that got to do with the price of fish? After some seconds of mutual bewilderment, it finally dawns on me that there used to be a small black button called start at the bottom left of the screen which popped up if you waved the mouse at it. But this PC is Windows 8 and does not have anything so old speak as a start button, or at least, if it does, I don't know where it lives. More mutual bewilderment and after a while the pleasant young lady goes offline to consult her colleagues, returning in a few minutes to announce that there is indeed a problem with the system and that she will ring me back when it is fixed, offering as excuse the fact that she had only just come on duty. She did phone back after not very many minutes and I did the business, not terribly impressed that the Virgin Money Command Bunker did not hang out a big sign when their system went down so that everybody knew.

Then I moved onto mobile phone, the presenting symptom being the sporadic tendency of the battery to move from apparently fully charged to actually flat. Into Carphone Warehouse, where I do all of my modest mobile phone business, having had satisfactory service hitherto. Oh sir, your battery is swelling is about to explode. Like pretty much everybody else you have been charging it overnight which after a few months is apt to do it in. Overcharging very bad. Oh no sir, we don't sell batteries for such an antique as that. And furthermore, be careful where you do buy one as lots of people rip you off on batteries. No I don't know where around here you ought to go. OK, what about if you sell me a new (pay as you go) phone instead. Yes sir, three bags full sir, what about this nice Samsung for nearly £30. Pretty much the same as what you have got now, only updated. Yes, you can walk out of the shop with it up and running, less your address book as there is no way for me to get if off such an ancient phone as your Nokia. Furthermore, I can't sell you a cable to connect your new phone to your PC. Try Maplins across the road. Which I do, without success. Try another phone shop a bit further along, also without success. But at least the pleasant young lady there suggests that I try the mobile phone kiosk in the Costcutter Post Office which used to be the Post Office Post Office a bit further along. Success; a further £7 and I am fully tooled up.

Some hours later, fortified by lunch, I then set about completing the installation of my shiny new phone. Type in a chunk of my address book printed off the Nokia by the PC. Pleased that I can still do this, despite the phone now having no chip. But now I try to connect the Samsung to the PC and the real troubles start.

Start off by downloading something called Samsung New PC Studio from the Samsung site. All goes well until the very end when it announces that it has failed to make a registry entry. Try again with the same result. Time to phone up the BT help service to which I subscribe. Pleasant young man from Newcastle this time. He takes over my PC OK, but does not seem to be an expert on this particular sort of problem, which I suppose is fair enough; they must get an awful lot of stuff thrown at them. After some palaver we decide that maybe this product does not work with Windows 8. We break off and I get onto Carphone Warehouse who pass me onto some Geek Team who promptly ask me to flash the plastic. I get a bit cross at this point: I have to pay some more money to Carphone Warehouse to get my shiny new mobile phone to actually work? The geek explains that he is not Carphone Warehouse and maybe I should not have been passed to him. But he relents and takes a bit of interest, suggesting that maybe I should be using something called Samsung Kies rather than New PC Studio. So, a little carelessly, I attempt to load it from one of the many download sites offered by Google. It appears to load OK but no icons appear on the desktop and all kinds of rubbish seems to have infested my PC.

Back to the BT help desk, who gently suggest that maybe sir would have done better to download the thing from the Samsung site rather than from goodness knows where. Which we then do. All loads up OK and we now get no less than two desktop icons, but we can't see the mobile phone from the PC, despite the mobile phone being able to see it. Neither through Kies nor through anything else. Dark talk of drivers and we try loading the little disc which came with the cable - which involves lying the PC on its side so that the little disc does not fall out of the large hole - but BT rule that the contents of the little disc are not relevant. Maybe sir ought to go back to the kiosk to complain about the cable. At this point, having spent more or less the whole afternoon on a mobile phone that I might use once a day when it is up and running, I give up, pausing only to uninstall everything that has arrived on the PC that day. A little bit of fiddling with the damaged Chrome settings and all seems to be well again. But rather frayed in temper and in need of something stronger than the cup that cheers.

Up this morning to return to the attack. Not exactly full of beans, but full enough. Not that any of this is really anyone's fault, just the product of a world with too many toys and too much change. But all rather tiresome for someone for whom a mobile phone is not the biggest toy in the world but who can't afford to have someone else sort it all out.

PS: interested to read that the Home Secretary has decreed that every infraction of some particular sort by any one of her many border guards must be reported to her in person that very same day. Which suggests to me a complete breakdown of management and trust in the upper reaches of the Home Office. What sort of an organisation requires the chief officer to meddle in affairs of the front line like this? Have they never heard of management? Presumably, after a while, she will become bored with the reports, which will be come to be processed, increasingly laconically, by her outer office on her behalf. But an awful lot of management time will have been expended before the furore completely dies down. One wonders where she learned her management style, as to judge from her potted biog. she is no slouch; a geographer at Oxford who progressed - or perhaps processed - through the Bank of England, through Merton Council and so into national politics. A professional politician rather than a professional anything else, but at least she has been anything else. But perhaps she has never had anything much to do with managing large number of grunts, preferring to stick with the more amenable matters of policy. But why are her advisers not telling her? What is puss up to? Sulking?