We all know how much we rely on technology - it pretty much rules our lives. All good and well when it works. Fantastic and a little scary to see how rapidly and cleverly it advances. Not too long ago, the notion of writing these words and making them instantly available to millions of people was ludicrous. Now it's a cultural norm.

We're never made more aware of how lost we are without technology than when it fails to work. For example: the notebook PC whithout which we can't run our business, which apart from the odd crash, had shown no signs of ill health until last Monday when the backlight on the monitor died. Aparently it was "just its time". Attempts were made to hook the notebook up to an external monitor, and the rank smell of burning electronics indicated that several components apart from the backlight had also found their enigmatic time to die.

Fortunately we had the forsight to back most data up on an external hard drive. We're up and running again after several days of waiting to find out whether the notebook could be resurrected (negative) and then going through the very tedious process of reinstalling dozens of applications and updates, transferring data, retrieving lost passwords... the list goes on.

The dreaded PC burnout is something we've all had to endure at least once - often with disasterous and expensive consequences. There's never a good time for it to happen, but somehow computers seem to have the intuition to know when the worst possible time is... the day before you were due to hand in your doctoral thesis; the day you complete your four movement symphony or your all-singing, all-dancing business database... it's just uncanny. And so the great "PC burnout" excuse now resides comfortably next to the "dog ate my homework" excuse.