Real life | 14 January 2012

Is it too much to ask for the machines in my life to stop ordering me about? Am I reaching for the stars in wanting to be loosely in control of my car, my phone and my laptop, rather than me being at their beck and call?

I’m not talking about the odd message telling me a battery is low or the petrol is running out. I’m talking about them treating me like a despised underling. The other day the laptop decided to kick ten bells out of me for no reason whatsoever. I did everything it asked from the second I switched it on. There was, as usual, a new version of Mozilla Firefox that it was desperate to download. Then it wanted to run a security scan, so I clicked the ‘scan now’ button — I’ve learnt not to provoke it by trying to ‘scan later’ — and let it rummage around looking for viruses until it declared itself 100 per cent satisfied.