I emerge, blinking, into the new dawn of a new information age, with a new router.

So on Wednesday the 19th, the lights on the router began to flicker ominously, and my computer told me simultaneously that I was and was not connected to the internet. All indications confirmed the latter. For instance, I couldn't connect to the internet. That was the first clue.

Thus ensued an amazing, inspirational story in which I ring an internet service provider and they tell me they will come in four days' time within a five-hour window and I confirm the appointment with  three  different  people  and on the day I wait the full five hours but lo! the engineer doesn't show and the phone appointment people finally admit that they failed to pass the appointment on to an engineer and they arrange another appointment, now in another three days' time and there is a great deal of argument and rending of hair and garments and then there is some violent hyperbole (am I allowed to say that I hunted them down and battered them all to death with my broken router?) and then I lose my mind and go to their corporate headquarters and dismantle it piece by piece with my bare hands, eventually joined and aided by hundreds, then thousands of other disgruntled customers all baying like wild animals and inflicting horrible acts of technology-themed brutality, and the whole of the evil entity is trampled into the ground and the earth there sown with salt. Then, once rid of the sinister useless corporate menace, the world is a peaceful and happy place.

No, what really happened was that I was transported into the eighties, when the phone service was an expensive and laughable shambles and there was no internet. Thanks BT!

Today they replaced my router and I'm back. Time travel is fun.