Even if your firm doesn't have a computer, you could be forgiven for inventing the existence of one to carry the can for all your blunders.

I merely make this plea on behalf of all long-suffering customers: if you make the cause of these non-existent computer errors interesting, you may even be believed.

For instance, if a customer has placed an order five times and still not received the goods, it just isn't good enough to blame the computer. That's simply a silicon-chip-age version of 'the van's broken down'. Give the thing some personality: 'I'm afraid our computer has taken against customers whose name begins with a W or whose first name is Christopher. It accepts the order then destroys the ledger entry and erases your name from its memory. It does it every time. It's a very personal fault and our engineers are doing all they can to find out why it has taken exception to you and all our other Ws. Can you think of anything you might have done to upset it?'

The first case of 'computer murder' was reported in America recently. A frustrated customer burst into a firm's computer room and pumped six .38 slugs into the blinking, whirring machine, causing massive brain damage and instant technological death.

The attack gave me ideas and it should give you some, too. 'Unfortunately, someone shot the computer' is a pretty damned good excuse for just about anything.

A friend swears that when he phoned his bank in the country to complain about a wrong entry on his statement, a cashier told him, 'Yes, that would have been about the time Smokey had her kittens.'

'Who is Smokey and what the hell have her kittens got to do with my account being wrongly debited?' he inquired.

'Smokey is the bank's cat. Somehow she squeezed under the computer and had her litter there. We had to shut down the computer for two hours while we retrieved the kittens and I'm afraid that one or two errors did occur as a result.'

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