I am a shell of a person, an empty husk. I am a cipher set adrift in the universe by the modern equivalent of Stanley Kubrick's psycho-computer Hal singing Daisy Daisy as it pushes me gently out towards the vast empty universe and certain death.

My computer has crashed. It has lost its mind, and I have responded by losing mine.

It was (is) an expensive new Macbook Pro - two months old with barely any mileage save some light novel writing - and it crashed while I was downloading something called 'new Firmware.' I don't know what Firmware is, but I followed the instructions to the letter. Nevertheless, halfway through the process, the machine died. I phoned Matt and Joe, The Fixers.

"So," they said calmly (one on the mobile and one on the landline), "you pressed start for 15 seconds, held down apple/alt and the letters P and S until three chimes rang?"

Sometimes I think they're just trying to make me look foolish. "Yes."

"And it's doing nothing at all?"

"Wait," I cried. "It's making a noise. It's kind of an ehhhhh-uhhhhh noise."

"Oh dear," said Matt, a man not given to saying 'oh dear.' "That's what we call the chime of death."

The chime of death? Fabulous.

I have spent the last half hour shouting at an indifferent Apple operative. Well, not shouting, exactly, if by shouting you mean the decibel level required to stop puppies from creeping onto beds when no one's looking. More like 'outraged pleading combined with furious sobbing'. To no avail. It will take ten days to order a new logic board, and nothing will be retrievable from the hard drive before that. And no, we can't get you a logic board in some back room in London. Or in New York (I don't buy this - NYC is just the sort of place that's sure to be teeming with logic boards, for a price), or in Berlin, Moscow, Paris, Rome or even Silicon Valley.

I can not believe this.

"But this is my livelihood!" I shout/plead/beg/rant. "I can't live, I can't breathe, I can't work, I'm losing thousands of pounds a day" (gross exaggeration, but easier to claim than the loss of confidence, sanity, temper). "What kind of service do you call this?" I resort to outrage, thinking if I were a man who had a vague idea what a hard drive did, this wouldn't be happening. "Surely you can't expect a modern human being to survive without ten million un-backed-up e-mails for 10 days. I can't get my schedules, addresses, stickies, e-tickets, I am RUINED." This last is a touch Dickensian, but really, I'm not acting. Most of my hard drive is backed up, except for the last 48 hours worth of revisions on the new novel - about 47 hours of work. And my e-mails, stickies, schedules, i.e., everything important.

In case you're wondering, I'm writing this on my husband's computer. He's desperate to check his own e-mails. My daughter is desperate to play her Penguin game.

And I'm just desperate.