When technology won’t play ball

THERE aren’t many things more irritating than technology that isn’t working properly.

Printers, I tend to find, actively work against whoever has the audacity to want to print something.

Of course when things go well we tend not to notice, and I’m not saying we should all go back to using an abacus and smashing up modern machinery like the Luddites of old.

But just sometimes I wonder if living in some sort of hut where the most advanced technology is man-made fire would be quite nice.

Yesterday, I spent the majority of my day sitting in a virtual queue, trying to buy tickets for the next Rugby World Cup, in France, in 2023.

I failed, by the way, and you would be correct in assuming there is a bee firmly lodged in my bonnet.

The website had clearly been designed by someone who had never used a website, or a computer for that matter.

After five hours – and that’s not an exaggeration – I managed to get through the queue, only to be told that my password needed to be reset.

Fine, I thought – a fairly painless process surely?

I could not have been more incorrect.

In order to reset your password, you had to rejoin the start of the queue.

My patience was beginning to wane by now, and my blood pressure was edging into the danger zone.

Then after another hour, and for precisely no reason whatsoever, I was kicked off the queue.

Now at this point, dumped out of the process after six hours, I wanted a proper apology from someone, on bended knee and preferably in writing to my lawyers. What I do not want is a jovial message saying “Oops, looks like something went wrong!” followed by a completely blank screen.

This may sound tinfoil-hatty, but driven half-crazy by queueing I did start to wonder whether the dark forces of the internet were deliberately conspiring to irritate me personally.

Never mind, if I was going to get a fortnight in the south of France, sipping cold beers on a Mediterranean promenade before heading to the rugby then this was worth it, I told myself. And what else better did I have to do in lockdown anyway?

By going to my happy place, I managed another two hours of queueing, and I did finally get through again, only to find out all the tickets were sold out.

So it looks as though I’ll have to add a TV to the list of technology allowed in my hut.