Paul Monckton

Spam really can increase your girth by at least five inches and I'm sure that, under the right circumstances, it'll significantly increase your bust size too, although I certainly don't want it in my email.

This really is a case of a few idiots spoiling it for the rest of us. Whatever mind-devouring nasties the unenviable psychological trauma of having small reproductive organs may unleash upon a person, belief in miracle enlargement pills surely shouldn't be one of them.

But some fool, somewhere, isn't only consuming spam, but replying to it, buying the products, becoming a porn star and making these guys a profit. Stop it. Stop it please!

And spam isn't limited to just email. If you know anything about computers - I mean if you're happy with opening the case and changing a hard drive - you're spammed with hardware.

Or rather, if you're happy with first imaging the original drive onto the new one, then swapping them over - ah, but the Bios doesn't support drives larger than 137GB, so let's just repartition it and the drive cable doesn't quite reach and ...

One lost weekend later and the PC is now working and ready to hand back, but now anything that does go wrong is 'your' fault. You've just opened up a new technical support line and wouldn't it have just been easier to buy your friend a new computer and then run off and hide somewhere? Yes, it definitely would have been.

Someone brought a lovely old ThinkPad into the lab last week. We fixed it. There was much hair loss. It wouldn't boot from CD-Rom, the battery wouldn't charge. It had no floppy drive. It needed a Bios upgrade. We fixed it. We really, really fixed it.

They took it away and gave it to a delighted niece, who switched it on and bawled her little eyes out as it fell apart onscreen. She hadn't broken it: it had broken itself.

It had restored the natural order of things by returning to the state where it should have remained and where we should have left it - and don't they realise how much they'd have to actually pay someone to do this? About as much as a new computer, that's how much.

If you ask me to do this, you're asking me for a free computer. Except it's not free, because I have to go out and buy it, don't I? Not in cash, but in my effort, my weekend, my hair ...

So why am I saying all this? Ask my editor - he made me do it. He wanted a column about something technical; something that matters to you, he said. Well, this is what matters to me.

Old ThinkPads are my spam. They arrive unsolicited, cheery Post-It notes attached: "I think this has a virus or a broken hard drive or no processor or its internet is broken, can you fix it please?"

Natural selection condemns the unspammed to extinction: when searching for a mate, what chance have we against these large-breasted, virile spam consumers with their pre-approved homeowner loans and bucket loads of Viagra?

We must stop this. Track them down and kick them off the internet. I'm told Kevin Bacon must know at least six of them, or something like that. So, let's start in Hollywood and let's start now before it's too late, before we're being pointed at and screeched at by Donald Sutherland ("Bacon-number 1!") in an Invasion of the Spam Snatchers-style takeover of the world.

Sorry, but I'm getting wound up now. I've got nowhere to put all my XML and the editor doesn't understand me. I might have to send him some email about it. A lot of email.

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