Mr Grumpy's broken toys

Oh dear. First his computer crashed bigtime and he was not at all amused. He bought a new chip, then a motherboard battery, then finally a new motherboard and is going to spend the next few days rebuilding his machine and reloading all his softwear. Still, it keeps him occupied!

Not only that, but when he came to pick me up yesterday, my friend had just collected her mobile from the repair shop and couldn't get it to work. "Give me your chip and I'll put it in my phone and see if it works," said our hero. It did. He slipped it back into my friend's phone for her, and ta-da! It sprang into life, complete with at least ten now redundant messages from me, saying whereabouts I was standing so she could find me outside the station (we missed each other, natch!).

When he came to replace his own SIM card into his phone, it slipped from his stroke-damaged fingers and disappeared down a crack in her decking. Disaster! "Never mind," said our philosophical knight on a Nokia charger, "I'll ring Virgin Mobile and ask them to send me another."

We got home and soon I could hear a tremendous telephone row going on downstairs, Mr G versus a call centre person in, it turned out, the Philippines. This person was demanding not only details of Mr G's name, address and bank account, but his credit card details, too. "You don't need that information and if you insist, you can cancel my contract NOW!" bellowed Mr G, his blood pressure escalating along with his chances of having a third stroke.

Luckily, he found someone at Virgin in the UK who sorted it out for him and yes, Mr G was quite right, the fellow in the Philippines had no right to ask for his credit card details. Could he have been running a scam on the side? Virgin are going to look into it. But oh, the blissful silence from Mr G's phone, that is set to a variety of different ringtones according to the person who calls, ranging from Ozzie at his most effing and blinding, to a porn star's silken purr (I wonder which caller THAT is? Could it be the phantom ladyfriend under whose influence he is purchasing all this Wild West gear? Hmmm)