There s an episode of Seinfeld in which Jerry buys an expensive Pocket Wizard for his father s birthday, but tells him he acquired it from some guy for 50 bucks because he knows Morty will be more enthused about the gift if he thinks it s stolen.

Do you think it might be hot? enquires his old man conspiratorially, upon opening the present.
Could be! comes the earnest reply, to Morty s obvious delight.
The Wizard can work all sorts of magic: send and receive faxes and e-mails, operate as a diary, an alarm clock, the whole nine yards. However, despite its myriad functions, once Seinfeld the elder has been shown how to open his new toy, he uses it exclusively for doing sums in restaurants, referring to it throughout much to his son s annoyance as a tip calculator .
I only mention this because I recently took delivery of my own tip calculator a new PC which I also suspect might be hot. It probably isn t, but it might be. And like Morty Seinfeld, that s good enough for me. Consider this:
(i) I bought it from a bloke I don t know.
(ii) Better still, he s one of those mysterious and shady mate of a mate type characters.
(iii) I never actually got to meet him, as the deal was negotiated through a middle-man.
(iv) I m reliably informed by someone who knows these things that it s top of the range and would have cost at least a grand new, but I got it for 300 quid.
(v) The monitor has a Reminder sticker in the corner which someone has unsuccessfully attempted to remove. It reads: The transmittal (including forwarding) or downloading of inappropriate or offensive materials or messages on Firm systems is a violation of the Code of Conduct and Web Usage Policy, and can result in disciplinary action, up to and including dismissal.
Now, before you draw any conclusions, I might as well add that there are infinitely more reasons to believe that my cheap new acquisition did not fall off the back of a lorry, but is instead a useless heap of shit. For example, the one thing that assures me that my state of the art appliance isn t powered by a hamster running tirelessly on a wheel inside the hard drive is the fact that it keeps giving me electric shocks, the voltage of which could not possibly be generated by a mere rodent. Also, I m told that the mysterious Kaiser Sosa-esque character who sold it to me is not a sheepskin coat-sporting, cocktail-quaffing, Reliant Robin-driving wheeler dealer from Peckham, but a well-heeled accountant with a reputable city bank (a reputable bank . . . ha!) who wished to offload his PC in a hurry because it was cluttering up his new docklands flat, and anyway, he d just got a free, spanking new laptop from work.
Throw in the fact that the bloody thing sounds like a jumbo jet awaiting take-off clearance; that I have to keep writing the word quid all the time because the pound sign button doesn t work; that I have to press the inverted commas button to get an @ sign and vice versa, and you ll soon realise that it isn t quite the bargain I originally thought.
My own personal theory is that the computer was assembled in a plant located on an ancient Indian burial ground, and is therefore possessed by evil spirits. Needless to say, if one was to confront the manufacturers concerned, they d have you believe that the cemetery was moved from the site of their factory before building commenced. Anyone who has seen Poltergeist, however, will tell you that, although they d moved all the headstones, the inhabitants of the graves were probably left untouched and consquently abandoned in spiritual limbo. Therefore, the kinetic energy being generated by the lost souls floating aimlessly around my PC would go some way towards explaining the aforementioned electric shocks, while I ve lost count of the occasions that I ve practically leapt out of my chair in terror upon being greeted by a disembodied female voice saying Welcome to AOL! any time I go on-line.
By far and away the creepiest thing about my Personal Computer is that, for a machine, it s a little bit too personal. For example, from time to time when, instead of working, I choose to spend several days staring absentmindedly at the gravity-defying cleavage of the nubile young vixen that adorns my desktop wallpaper, a little message materialises on the screen in front of me which reads: You have been idle for a while. Do you wish to shut down?
Now, I am a tolerant man who is prepared to put up with certain things from a computer. I can handle the manner in which its spell-check refuses to acknowledge that my name is Glendenning, preferring instead to repeatedly try and call me Barry Gladdening; I can accept its steadfast refusal to divulge the whereabouts of my pound sign and utterly inability to locate the printer, despite the fact that the bloody thing is right there on the table beside it. However, I will not have a glorified tip calculator tell me when I m being idle, as the infuriating work ethic I have been cursed with since birth enables me to figure that particular one out for myself.
Now, excuse me while I attempt to hack into www.youngfinegael.com and engage in the transmittal of offensive messages.