Is there anything else I can help you with today?

I was just looking to see if any of your comments have gone into spam when I discovered that - so far - you have all left me over 74,000 comments. That must mean that John's tally should be in the millions.

This weekend, as with most of the last three weekends, will be a hair-tearingly technical one for me. Since effortlessly transferring all the data from the old iMac to the new, I have been trying to completely wipe it off the old one so I can safely get rid of it. 

At my first attempt I failed when it should have been easy, so I called an Apple technician to talk me through it. Normally, Apple techies are very tolerant and polite, but this one was not. I must have arrived at the end of a very long day for him (I don't know what time it was in the USA) because he became increasingly rude and hostile, barking at me when I asked him if he was still there after several long silences. 

"I am TRYING to look up information for you which will help" and "That is what I just told you to do, wasn't it?!" were just two of his favourite comments, said through gritted teeth. At one point I said to him that I would not have called him for help if I knew what I was doing, so he should show a little more patience. Finally he gave up and said I should cart the whole thing - physically - down to the Apple shop here in town and let them do it. When he signed off he did not send the usual 'how did I do' form to rate him, which is a shame.

So I left the whole business until the following weekend, then trawled through as many forum  articles and You Tube videos which I thought might help, during which time I discovered what the problem was. That took a couple of hours.

When our old computer was new it ran on an operating system called 'Snow Leopard'. A few years later I upgraded it to one called 'El Capitan'. Those days it was done with a C.D. When I upgraded it I missed out one small but important part of the procedure and Snow Leopard locked itself up and threw away the key. I cannot unlock it to erase it and that is where the problem lies.

But, according to one altruistic wizard, I can. I mean if Apple can unlock it without using a sledge hammer, then so can I. That's the plan anyway. I am not carrying it down to Southgate and I am not able to drive it down. You can't park anywhere near the place. Anyway, I would not just leave it with them and trust them to erase all my data safely before they dispose of it. I would rather use the sledgehammer technique.

There is just one other little techie problem which I have to sort out too this weekend. H.I. somehow poured half a bottle of water over her iPhone last week, and now it doesn't work properly. We have to buy another, then I have to transfer all the data from the ruined one onto it...