Bad Luck

I've been having a run of luck that makes Job look like the winner of a moderately-sized lottery. They say bad luck comes in threes. In my case, it came in three large container ships that had recently been hijacked and set on fire by Somali pirates.

The bad luck fairy started with a simple, bold statement – sentencing me to three months of pain and immobility in the form of severe back problems. It was a lovely summer. I know because I watched every moment of it passing outside my window.

As the days shortened and the morning became misty, I gradually recovered the ability to perform complex tasks, such as standing up or putting on socks. On the verge of becoming a productive member of society again, the luck devils decided it was the perfect time to start messing with my computer.

Like many members of modern society, I can do almost nothing without access to a computer. I'm not trained to do any jobs that involve putting my hands on things in the physical world, and, thanks to my bad back, I couldn't even offer to carry heavy objects for people. As wisps of cartoonish smoke drifted from the back of my laptop, I realised I had literally become a useless human being.

I don't need to describe the pain and frustration associated with getting a computer fixed. It's the modern equivalent of what our ancestors went through when their cow got sick – everybody experiences it at some time, and everybody swears they will make some kind of back-up cow at the time, and then immediately forgets all about it.

When my computer reemerged from that mysterious back room where they fix computers, it looked like new. Nobody really knows what goes on in those hidden rooms where computer repair people live. As far as we know, they wave a magic wand, which takes about four seconds, and then spend the next five days polishing the screen and scrubbing the keyboard so that we feel a thrill about getting back the same machine we had a week previously.

In my case they apparently also fitted a device that causes Internet connections to explode the moment they are plugged back in. It was at this point that I began to suspect malicious forces were having some sport with me. I may have thought that I was useless without a computer, but having a computer with no Internet connection made me arguably even more useless. The problem is that it turns out to be impossible to do any kind of work on a computer without looking something up on Google every 30 seconds, while it is easily possible to waste entire afternoons playing Minecraft on a computer without going anywhere near the Internet.

And now I realise I have only just begun my journey across the continent of ill fortune. I was struggling up slopes I assumed to be mountains, only to discover they are the foothills to the dreadful and perilous range that is dealing with a Polish telecoms company. If I survive, I will never again complain about minor irritations such as spinal injuries or violent death.

Jamie Stokes