I can’t take it anymore.  This is my last blog.  I will never write another.    After this blog I am going to take my computer and hurl it from my window to the street thirty feet below.  I will then find a bothy and live a simple life in the mountains.  I will have no Internet connection and I will not care.  I will hunt deer and catch trout from a stream and never look at a computer again.  Why?  The answer is simple…I have Mouse Rage.

I am furious and frustrated.  The Internet is there to bring the world into your home at the click of a mouse.  With your computer you’ll be able to cruise the virtual world and experience things that our father’s only dreamt of.  Is that what happens.  No!

What happens is this.

You spend hours of your life waiting for pages to load.  Watching Microsoft’s little rotating icon telling you that the internet page you want is loading.

The World Wide Web will make all kinds of excuses.

It “Can’t load because of a long running script.”

Or just “please wait.”

Or one of the worst is…”Windows is searching for a solution.”  Is it?  Well it never tells you what it’s found.

Worst of all, the screen just freezes and mists over and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.

I’m growing old waiting for the bloody computer to load a web page. I sit transfixed, all I wanted to know was the times of the buses to Fort William but no, that’s too difficult, too much to ask in this age of instant information.  I’m forced to sit while my Broadband connection decides to doze off for half an hour.

My blood pressure rises, heart rate increases I am seized by fury.   In desperation I pick up the mouse and batter it repeatedly against the desk like a cave man trying to smash the skull of a bear.  I know this won’t help, I know it’s not the mouse’s fault but what else can I do.  Only violence can vent my anger and the mouse is the closest thing I’ve got to being able to kill something which is exactly what I want to do right now.  In despair I reboot the router and wish I’d never heard of the Internet.  Little lights flash and I realise that all of this in some inexplicable way is almost certainly my fault.

We are all cave men at heart and the Internet is there to torment us.  You know why there are no Neanderthals about?  They didn’t die out.  Oh no, somehow they found out about the Internet and killed themselves rather than put up with it.

Sorry I have to go now and find something to kill.  Where’s that mouse!