Typo? Negative.

 Every day I sit down to write. But what I do, instead, is lock horns with a computer that wants to destroy me. It doesn't want to destroy my work, just me, through slow, elegant attrition. It's death by a thousand glitches. 

It has never worked properly. It has always hated me. This isn't anthropomorphism. This bastard has a grudge, and knows exactly how to push my buttons. Which is the wrong way round, surely. 

I sit down, I draw a deep breath, and press the computer's on button. It yawns into life, like Bagpuss with a hangover. It takes some time to slowly fill in all the changes I've made using my other computer, lead-booted, in its grudging, jobsworth manner, and it updates anything anyone has said to me on social media. It will then flash me a reminder of whatever it was I was doing on this day a year ago. I don't know why. 

Then come the pop ups. It constantly wants me to tighten my online protection, even though the protection is so tight the computer refuses to play any videos at all, until I reassure it everything is fine. It treats news reports, the songs of Brian Eno, and 1970's Public Information Films as though they were the most depraved, mal and spyware slathered hardcore pornography. I just want to watch Gruff Rhys' Candy Lion video. It's wholesome fun. His hands are above the table the whole time. 

But it's when I'm actually working, or more often, researching, that it really comes into its own. The computer decides that going from one screen to another is something it's really going to have to think about, actually. So it does. And I sit staring at a blank screen as it chews it over, like a ponderous cudster. But the thing that really infuriates, that has me raging so much I have to go outside and kick a tree - and that tree is blameless - is when the cursor starts getting into quark mode. I'll move it to go somewhere and it...just wont. It'll fail to move. Or it will appear somewhere else. Or will have contrived to land on a side-bar advert, and is slowly opening a page about designer bathrooms, or some no hoper's sponsored advert for a self-published urban fantasy novel. And then the bots will wake up, and all I'll see for the rest of the day is see are bad books with AI covers and freestanding, clawfoot bath tubs. 

It all takes so long, there's endless faffing about: the sudden freezes, the yawning gulfs between screens, the attempts to get the cursor to go where it should actually be going. I could have written so much more. Maybe it's the universe staunching my flow. Three books in a year, John. It's too much. Slow down, you move too fast. Nature is healing, and its scabbing over my keyboard, over my knuckles, my arthritic hands. 

Also, the letters disappear on the keyboard when direct sunshine falls on them. What an unexpected design boon. I wonder who thought of that? Mr Hewlett or Mr Packard? Cocks, the pair of them. 

And yet here I am. Typing this tirade against technology on the same computer I so loathe, and that hates me back. Persisting. Shortening my life.