Interlaken, Switzerland

Everything seemed to be going swimmingly, so it was about time for something to go wrong, and it did so in a pretty spectacular fashion today. Pulling out my laptop from my bag this morning, the screen fired up with a bright and cheery row of multicoloured parallel lines that really shouldn’t have been there – not even on Windows “Fisher Price” XP. I blinked, dumbfounded, and proceeded to investigate the problem carefully using the standard IT procedure of how we fix things in the trade, a highly complicated process known as “turning it off and on again”.

The lines were still there. Troubling. I proceeded to stage two of the standard investigative process, which those in the business will also be familiar with, involving as it does going to Google and typing a carefully-targeted search query along the lines of “why are Sony VAIOs so completely and utterly shit?”. Of the “About 13,800,000,000 results” returned by big G, I found a couple that seemed to describe the symptoms I was seeing. It seemed as if the connectors to the LCD display had worked loose, likely due to warping of the case. This made sense. My laptop had been chucked around with me pretty much wherever I went in the last two years, and finally it had had enough of the rough treatment I had dealt it and it had booked a one-way trip to the Great Horseshoe Magnet in the Sky.

Slowly and inexorably over the course of the day the horrendously joyful dancing rainbow lines crept closer and closer towards the Windows Start button, leaving in their wake an increasingly dead area of black screen. When the size of useable screen space was about the size of a postage stamp, I backed up my crucial files to a USB drive, said the last read/rites, and my VAIO was gone – forever.

Arse.

This was a problem. I could no longer progress work on the website projects that were helping to pay my way around the world. Working on a public internet computer was out of the question as well. Not only was it pricey in Switzerland at a hair-raising £4 an hour, but also none of the tools I needed were available to me and as a mere pleb of a user I wasn’t allowed to install any of them. Nevertheless, I tried to do some work on the hostel computer, but after wrestling with a mouse that would move about a centimetre on-screen for every couple of kilometres of movement over the desk and clicked only when you didn’t want it to, I managed to accidentally delete one of my websites in its entirety, and gave up the idea of work as a lost cause.

To further add to the frustration, it was raining outside, and the TV screen in the common room which broadcast the latest views from the Jungfrauhoch was as featureless as my laptop screen, the mountains being completely caked in cloud. I had to take my chances with the weather tomorrow, although from the look of the forecast it didn’t look promising that it would change soon.

I commiserated that evening in a Korean restaurant with a hearty bowl of udon noodles accompanied by a plate of gyoza dumplings and started to plan how to deal with the laptop situation. I needed a replacement, so the moment I got near a branch of the German Media Markt electronics store I would let my credit card take the hit. But at least I had learned something from the whole sorry affair: it helps to look after things.

That and never buy a Sony VAIO.