They laugh when you say it, they always do nowadays. “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” I ask. “I knew you were going to say that!” they retort. But you didn’t do it, did you?

IT support is a mix of fairly rare, genuine problems, tedious admin tasks and coming to the sobbing realisation that, yes, somebody really did ask why they need to plug their new printer into a power socket when they specifically bought a wireless printer.

“What’s that banging noise?” they ask. “Oh, we’re having some work done,” I reply. It seems impolite to tell them I’m repeatedly banging my head against my desk. “I wanted to change my password but the ‘old password field’ just shows stars and I know that’s not what my password is. Have I been hacked?” Sometimes you just need to put them on hold and take a moment to compose yourself.

An acquaintance invites me out for a drink. That’s nice, I think; he wants to be my friend. Of course, when he arrives with his laptop bag it all becomes clear. Apparently, his seven-year-old laptop with no memory and a steam-powered processor is really slow. He thinks he might have been hacked.

Finally, a genuine disaster: servers are down. An entire office cannot work. This is what you pay your IT department for: you need someone with real computer skills – a true geek, no less. You read me the error messages flashing across everyone’s screen. Certainly sounds serious – complex error codes and dire warnings.

A restart will probably fix it. If not, there’s always Google.