Why I want to kill my computer

I am tortured by my computers. I ditched my old laptop last October when, at three years old, its malfunctions were driving me to the brink of insanity and euthanasia was my only option. (I would have crushed it with a sledgehammer if I'd had one.) Six months later, and its shiny successor is already getting the better of me. My tantrums have resumed. So have the desperate phone calls to technicians in Tibet.

I am tortured by my computers. I ditched my old laptop last October when, at three years old, its malfunctions were driving me to the brink of insanity and euthanasia was my only option. (I would have crushed it with a sledgehammer if I'd had one.) Six months later, and its shiny successor is already getting the better of me. My tantrums have resumed. So have the desperate phone calls to technicians in Tibet.

Well, if not Tibet, then Bangalore. Recently, I have been talking to lots of people in lots of Indian cities at all times of the night. Daytime for them, of course. The theory is that from the other side of the planet they will tell me which buttons to press to get the machine back to the way it was when I first unpacked it. To get it to perform exactly as it is supposed to.

These calls are free of charge, which is an extremely good thing, considering their frequency. But for a number of reasons, I should resist placing them at all. First off, what would my Democrat friends think?

It might be construed that by calling Madras almost daily, I am somehow complicit in the dark practice of "outsourcing". This is what happens when American corporations, like the manufacturer of this computer, send some of their jobs to foreign countries, like India, where the wages are low. And, if you are paying any attention at all to this year's election season, especially to the Democrats, you will know that outsourcing is the sin that is sinking the entire US economy.

But do I care about this? Of course, I don't. In fact, I have heard persuasive arguments that outsourcing is good for the economy. But the point here is that I would do almost anything to understand what my computer is doing to me, why it is doing it and how I can make it stop. I would vote for Bush in November if someone could guarantee me six clear months of trouble-free computing. Of course, as a "resident alien" in America, I can't vote anyway - but you get what I mean.

Rather, the reason why I shouldn't engage in wee-hour telephone trysts across the hemispheres is because they never resolve a thing. These Samaritans of the cyber age are very friendly, for sure. But what they do is talk a lot and put you on hold even more. Then, only after they have had you scrub, flash, zip, defragment, configure, reconfigure, unzip - all of which undoubtedly inflicts still more damage to the insides of your machine - they inform you that they have run out of ideas. Sorry.

Apoplexy occasionally overtakes me. Like one night recently, with the clock edging towards two, when I seemed to be on the verge of a long-term relationship with a man called Raj, who was trying to determine why I could not connect to the Internet. Finally, we seemed to be nearing a solution when, phut, our phone connection went dead. Without Raj, my machine and I were lost all over again. I redialled my freephone number, but of course there was no finding Raj. Someone else answered, for all I knew in a different Indian city altogether, and Raj, doubtless relieved to be rid of me, had probably gone home for his tea.

This is the other thing that drives me nuts. The technician, after hours of long-distance tinkering, finally declares that the problem lies with the makers of the operating system, Microsoft, and not with the computer. I phone Microsoft - who charge me $35 per call - and, of course, they take still more hours to conclude that no, the problem does indeed lie with the machine. And so on. Where is that sledgehammer?

There is the occasional good surprise. Like when my 13-year-old son came by the apartment at the weekend and did something miraculous. He took the laptop, signed onto the Internet and proceeded to wander between rooms. Where was the telephone cord? He gave me that don't-be-an-idiot look and explained that he was connecting wirelessly. Apparently other people in my building have invested in expensive bits of paraphernalia that beam out the necessary signals and he was simply pirating them. Who knew?

And here is another shocker. Today, as I write, the makers of this computer actually sent a live human being to my office to determine why the batteries in my laptop will never ever charge. He came and he disassembled it and he put new bits in, including a replacement motherboard. Serious surgery, in other words. I'm sure you are dying to know. Is the battery working now? Of course it bloody isn't.

Red alert - Eddie's lost his breasts

I hereby put out an all-points alert in Manhattan for some missing breasts. These are falsies, of course, but nonetheless very valuable ones. They belong to the British comedian and actor, Eddie Izzard, who is currently in town on the set of a new film called Romance and Cigarettes. Izzard makes a cameo appearance in the film, which stars James Gandolfini, Kate Winslet and Susan Sarandon.

Izzard, who has another film coming out in Britain in June, called The Cat's Meow - in which he plays Charlie Chaplin - has taken the opportunity also to do some late-night stand-up gigs in the West Village. Sources tell me he is in "boy mode" right now, which means he is not wearing his standard dresses and tights. Nor, fortunately, his prosthetic boobs.

This is a very good thing. I am told that Izzard never leaves home without his special bag stuffed with not one, but three pairs of false breasts. But soon after arriving in Manhattan last week, he managed somehow to misplace the bag. So, please, any taxi driver, cop or wandering tourists who happen to fall upon his bouncing beauties, get in contact with me. And I will ensure they are reunited with bereft Eddie.