THE HACKER

I have been hacked. Some geek in a pair of national health spectacles and tufty ginger sideburns burrowed his way into my computer, and sent some excruciating American gambling website to everyone on my contact list, 123 people in all. That in itself is surprising because I have 120 fewer friends than that. I had to eat humble pie and apologise to each and every one of these poor folk, half of whom had never heard of me, the other half were doing their best to forget me. If I could have just caught up with that hacker for five minutes, I would have stuffed his motherboard into the smallest and most intimate recesses of his physiognomy. I have the latest anti-virus software, Ashanti or Avanti, I believe it is called. I know this because a weird mid-atlantic accent suddenly booms from my speakers and informs me that Ashanti/Avanti has been updated. I think it must be the latter, because the former was a film starring Michael Caine, if not Jack Hawkins. Anyway, Ashanti or Avanti clearly couldn't stop a pig in a passage. Most of my contacts were kind, merely referring to this as 'an unfortunate occurrence.' That did not ease my sense of utter humiliation for being associated with such an act of cruelty and folly, but time is a great healer and I suppose that one day I shall get over this. In the meantime, I am scanning Facebook and Plaxo Table Salt to see if I can catch a glimpse of those national health spectacles and ginger sideburns, most likely topped off with a Chic Murray bunnet. I'll let you know whether I am successful and what revenge I intend to exact. Needless to say, that will include several gigabytes of forceful RAM.