Real life | 26 March 2011

Never download anything strange from the internet. Never put your credit card details into a site you are unfamiliar with.

Yes, I know. But I was desperate. I couldn’t make my father’s new laptop work and having bought it for him as a gift I was miffed. So I started clicking on all sorts of dangerous-looking icons in an attempt to save face.

In particular, I decided to click ‘Download Microsoft Office now!’ This is because after a cursory examination of the machine I decided that the problem was most likely that, in a moment of blondeness, I had forgotten to install Office when I bought it, and that a free trial of the product had come to an end, thus disabling the system which should store my father’s documents.

‘Stand back, I can fix this,’ I said manfully. ‘No, really,’ I said, as my father tried to argue, ‘I know exactly what’s gone wrong here…I just need to click on this…and this…and put my credit card details in here…’ More protests from my father.