Pushing the wrong buttons

What is it about the Y chromosome that apparently imbues bearers with computing know-how and technological expertise? Bras have gone from being burned to being pointy, sufragretes trampled under horses hooves and slogans chanted and then ironically inverted. Yet is all this tantamount to the polishing of the glass ceiling? As happens in life, one of those back-breaking camel straws has just paralysed my bad tempered beast. Apparently, irreversible, my patience here has just morphed into total apoplexy.

The mythical competence gap between men and women in technology, is exacerbated by unfounded cockiness in the field: innate or learned I have no idea. I am besieged with guys insisting they need to clear my cache, defrag my machine, or reconfigure my browser. All these terms are invariably pronounced as though they are in the control room propelling the first NASA guinea pigs into orbit. If I want someone to f**k up my machine, then I shall say "Could you please f**k up my computer?" Failing that... I'm fine, thanks for offering.

Anyhow, seemingly, not having a penis somehow prevents my opinion from carrying any weight, makes my advice into the mere trifling waffle of a woman-thing and my time eminently expendable. Excuse the rant, but this serves as a cathartic cry into cyberspace, after I have wasted valuable hours over skype vainly trying to help an elderly male relative with IT issues. The first half was spent with me patiently defining every piece of computer-speak he could find on his machine or dredge up having overheard somewhere: web browser, cache, cookies, javascript, "error 302/400". None of this is assimilated and words such as "tabs", "icon" and "pop-up window" all switch identities with dizzying frequency.

Final scene: I was treated to a monologue of his own ignorance with no pauses for intervention or suggestions on my part (wondering why they connected to me and didn't simply sit and talk at the screen tout-a-seule). The computing problem was due to ham-fisted fiddling and a free Slovakian download from a possibly even more incompetent guy, since which the machine is not working, mylogic that the two could be connected is rejectd out of hand. Said male friend (with that deadly combination of complete stupidity and total confidence) is irreproachable, while hundreds of miles away I'm made to feel somehow culpable. My suggestion that someone put their finger in a pie that should have been kept out of reach of their incompetent fingers is batted away, projected back at me as gripe owing to my inability to remotely fix the problem. This is partly because interjecting proved so hard.

The icing on the f**ked up pie is that it transpires that none of my earnestly suggested, frankly inspired, changes have been finished off by pressing the OK or apply button at any time. Pressing this button was interpreted evidently as a frivolous whim of mine in my early instructions. Rendering my cache unemptiable- its simply full of ***$, history equally refuses to be rewritten , all the wrong buttons have been pushed and that otherwise enviable quality of computers to delete bad bits and edit themselves has failed. Guess he just pushed the wrong buttons.