Technology – that generic term for anything involving machines or computers that are capable of doing anything from helping to finding a cure for cancer to powering your phone or monitoring your cat’s daily activity. As brilliant as it is, it drives me crazy.

Yes you can get addicted to it, yes it probably rules many of our lives as we depend on it so much but today I’ve been on quite a journey into discovering how and why this happens.

First thing this morning I powered up my laptop to find it had updated itself during the night and then coincidently took forever to turn back on – not great for a busy journalist with a stack of emails to reply to and copy to edit and send off. A muffin and a glass of OJ later it had done its business and I was off. Happy me.

By lunchtime I’d installed about 4 plug-ins for a variety of different websites and spent about an hour in total waiting for them to install and worrying that they were all viruses on a mission to destroy my laptop. (No thank you Trojans, I’m perfectly capable of doing this myself. My last one died after a large glass of red wine poured itself onto my keyboard.)

This is when ‘signaturegate’ occurred. It was bad enough that I had to attend an online seminar about social media via the internet that I didn’t understand (I think it was a bit much for my brain to handle, I’m much happier travelling to various corners of the country to learn how to manipulate my social media, thanks) but I was told by the boss to create a signature for my work email address. Simple, right? Half an hour later I still hadn’t done it and sent a barrage of stressy emails to my boss exclaiming that it just wasn’t going to happen. Turns out I was a line space over the limit, ridiculous!

I then received a Facebook message from a friend who was on the verge of having a panic attack/collapsing/exploding/generally going mental because his iMac wouldn’t start, meaning he’d lose years of work. Luckily (sort of) he fixed the problem and has consequently spent hours reinstalling programmes that still won’t even start.

Feel free to call me a technophobe, but at this rate I’m going to end up living in a cave for the rest of my life.