Scaling the lofty heights of IT

Loft ladders are a painful task. I know this because I'm in the process of installing one. What madness took me over and made me do it I do not know, but madness it is. It also lost a load of data off my computer - but more of that later.

There was a key conversation that, for all intents and purposes, went the wrong way. It was in the loft ladder shop - a shop that, one way or another, I found particularly useless. Anyway, the conversation went thus:

Loft ladder man: 'Well, the ladder itself costs about #250, but for about #400 we can install it as well.'

Me (opens mouth to say something): '... '

My mate Dave (jumping in): 'Oh, we'll do it ourselves.' (Turns to me and, in a conspiratorial tone of voice, adds): 'Well, that's #150 we just saved.'

I closed my mouth and, against my better judgement, decided to save myself #150 and lose a load of data from my computer.

The time came and Dave arrived bristling with tools - Dave knows how to use tools and I sort of stand there and hand them to him. In an effort to help things along, I had made a hole in the ceiling to put the loft ladder in. It was with a sinking feeling that I received the information that there was more to it than that - there were bat hangers, joists, 4in screws, pilot drills and face masks. It was the face masks that made me the most nervous. Was there surgery involved?

Dave took the whole thing in hand and I wore my face mask, mainly as a courtesy to Dave. As time progressed, Dave and I frequently had to sit down and try to work out how to do things - often with a cup of tea and biscuits - and that's how I lost my data.

You see, for Dave to get the time to come and make my flat full of dust and lumps of concrete, he had to bring his son - my godson, Christopher - and Christopher is a wilful nine-year-old. A wilful nine-year-old that got bored during one of our conferences.

He wondered into my work room, saw my PC and, driven by the fearless curiosity that all nine-year-olds have but Christopher has in spades, he switched it on.

Only, of course, my PC was already switched on - blank screen = screensaver - so, bored by the fact that the screen didn't come on, he left it switched off.

The point: if it had been Dos or Windows 3.x, there would have been little bother - you would have had one application running and that's it. But Windows 95 allows you to have several applications running. Thus, when several apps are terminated by a flick of the power switch, not only are you likely to loose all the unsaved data in each of them, you are likely to confuse the hell out of Windows too - which is exactly what happened.

I think we need more nine-year-olds to test PCs.

If we can make them Christopher-proof, we could be onto a winner. Either that or have loft ladders installed by experts.

Chris Long is a freelance IT journalist.