One aspect of adult life that has (thankfully) passed me by is office hierarchy. I got a taste of it this morning when I went out to buy a new chair for my desk.

Office chairs are ranked according to seniority and comfort. Apparently you aren’t allowed to have one without the other.

So a junior typist gets a glorified stool with a backrest so low that any attempt to lean on it will cause irreperable damage to the coccyx.  Work hard at your keyboard for a decade or so, and you can be promoted to a full-size typist’s chair with manual lift.

All typists dream to be operators, though. I don’t know what an operator does – but they get ergonomic seats with plastic armrests.

As I was buying a chair for my home office, I decided to promote myself to "Entry Level Management." For this I get swivel and tilt, height adjustment, and real leather trim. But if I work hard and achieve all my targets, I should be entitled to an executive chair at some point in the future. This will have headrests, leather arms, a footrest and real wood trim.

Exam season is upon us once again, and Darling Wifey has a huge sack of students’ papers to mark along with a team of other examiners to supervise.

This year, however, public exam administration entered the computer age, and the old system of NCR papers and phone calls has been replaced by a live system, via the internet, of computerised record keeping. This being a government funded activity they have opted for a PC-based single platform programme.

Darling Wifey needed to borrow a PC.

It is now two years since we last had a PC up and running in this house, and 24 months of Mac use tends to spoil a guy. I had completely forgotten what PCs were like – and have just had a timely reminder in the brand new laptop that Darling Wifey has kindly been lent for her exam administration. Let’s do a proper review.

The model: a Compaq 6720s. We had high hopes for this machine, as we bought our first computer just after getting married in 1993, and it was a Compaq Contura Aero – a fine little machine. This one, however, is flimsy, with all the build quality of a sandwich box. And the screen flickers. Not a good sign in a brand new machine, and certainly not sharing the utterly solid build quality of a MacBookPro.

Signing on. We have a wireless network controlled by browser access from my laptop. The network found the Compaq and I granted it access without any problem. The laptop found the network. All good so far. But where is the Internet? Good question.

Actually, signing on to the Internet was relatively simple – there was nothing actually wrong – I just hadn’t selected the right connectivity options. But as reminders go of the simplicity of Mac use, this was a stark one. Connecting an Apple Mac to the Internet via our network takes two clicks: connecting the PC took 45 minutes, an excessive amount of swearing, and a downloaded troubleshooting guide to home wireless networks just to work out what the connectivity options should be, and how to change them.

The printer. Our network is designed to run on Windows, not Mac OS, but Mac OS adapts to it without any difficulty. Our printer is a Windows printer. We put the two together, and can print from any Mac in the house. It never, ever occured to me that this was difficult.

Until, that is, I used the “Find Network Printer” Wizard on a PC.

When you turn a Mac on in this house it asks you if you want to connect to our home network. If you say ‘yes’ and give it the right password, then our network printer is automatically made available to you. The Wizard scanned for the printer, but couldn’t find it. It was given the network URL for the printer, but nothing came of it. The IP location followed – but still the printer could not be found.

In the end I downloaded a printer driver and plugged the laptop in with a cable (remember cables? Houses used to be covered with them in the 20th century.)

Total elapsed time spent troubleshooting: 90 minutes.

Total time computer used: 180 minutes.

Conclusion: PCs are a complete and utter waste of time.

My school is being painted.

The council work crew painting it were complaining, apparently, that they had nothing to do, and were delighted when my school allocated a budget to paint the whole place. “Great ,” they thought, “something to fill the time .”

So last week a team of three painters spent two days painting a twelve foot square reprographics office, and three days painting a thirty feet long corridor. They have spent three days this week painting a classroom (not a large classroom, either – it is only just large enough for a class of 15 pupils ) and they still haven’t finished.

Schools don’t get painted very often because it is too expensive. I can see why.

I am also suffering from crushing envy and incandescent fury that there is another branch of employment by the government that is completely immune from performance targets, cost cutting exercises and those f***ing management consultants and inspectors who watch everything they do, tick boxes on clipboards, and then make them do it in a different way.

Bastards.