The fucking Start button

If I ever find the guy from Incredible Connection who sold my parents their goddam computer, I swear I will wring his goddam neck.

I will beat him until his asshole starts sucking buttermilk.
And I will then unscrew his neck and shit down his neck.
And then I will gouge out his eyeballs and skullfuck him.

(ad nauseum, thanks Stanley Kubrick...)

Every bloody night since last Tuesday I have had a phonecall.

"Bobby, the printer doesn't work... and we need to print." "Bobby, this screen keeps popping up and we can't get it to go away." "Bobby, the [insert any random goddam computer problem here.]

When I was back in South Africa in June my Dad decided it was the perfect time for an upgrade, so we traipse off to the bloody computer shop all the way in Canal Walk because that's where my dad insists the people know what they're talking about.

(This is an example of my dad's very lame attempts at father-son bonding)

Anyway, so the numpty in Incredible Connection (con being the operative word), sees my dad coming.

Me: "Dad, you don't need a computer with a Skype phone and build in webcam in the screen."
Man in computer shop: "If you don't have those accessories then you can't use Skype or do any sort of messenging and basically the PC will be worthless and you might as well just kill yourself."
Dad: "Yes, we'd better have them then."

In the end we walked out with this fucking thing (not a Mac) which had a tower, a large screen, a Skype phone, a mouse, a tablet mouse thingy (apparently mouses are bad for your wrists), a scanner, a printer, a wireless keyboard, a thing that connects it to the TV, bla bla bla.

Four months down the line and nothing is working. Everything is fucked.

And when they bought it my mum was dumb-founded so twice a week we had Jenny to come and give my mum and dad lessons.

Now I'm like, "well, where the hell is Jenny?"

My dad; "ag*, that bloody Jenny's a useless bitch." This is code for "we've pissed her off so much that she's told us to go fuck ourselves."

So here I am sitting in London, trying to help fix my parents' computer via phone using sentences like "you need to push the button in the bottom left hand corner called 'Start', do you see that?!"

And after twenty minutes of this, the back of my neck hurts and we're shouting at each other because I still don't understand why they have to / need to / want to print out their e-mails in colour anyway.

My parents were happy with their little cranky old machine that received e-mails, couldn't print and had Solitaire. Ignorance is bliss, I tell you.

So help me God if I ever bump into that computer salesman, I will smack him into the middle of next week. Bill Gates is only partially to blame for this.

* = "ag" is a South African exclamation.