According to Parkinson's Law, "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion" - ie if you give me a maximum of seven days to tidy the house, even though it should only take two hours, I'll stretch those two hours across the week, tidying in slow motion and taking plenty of coffee breaks, because hey, that's human nature.

This is what happens if you work from home: you get trapped within a fuzzy prison of your own construction. "Sorry, can't come out tonight. I'm supposed to be finishing this thing," you say, but then you stay in all evening, pottering about, channel surfing, standing in a corner repeatedly rubbing your head up and down the wall like a depressed polar bear; doing anything apart from "finishing this thing". And this cycle repeats for days on end, until finally the deadline lurches up, grabs you by the scruff of the neck, and forces you to knuckle down and complete it.

Like I say - human nature. Computers, of course, are far more efficient than humans. Nowhere is this more apparent than the field of time-wasting. You might blow a whole hour sitting on the loo reading a month-old Sunday supplement till your legs go numb, but that's nothing next to the swathes of your time your computer can piss down the drain.

I'm not talking about crashes, freezes, or hangs - but rather the endless stream of finickity little tasks a computer will set you without warning. The tiny hoops you have to jump through before it gives you what you want.

Install this driver. Now update it. Now update it again. Register to login to our website. Then validate your membership. Forgot your password? Click here. Now there. Fill out this form. And this one. And this one. Please wait while TimeJettison Pro examines your system. Download latest patch file. Please wait while patch file examines own navel. Remove cable. Insert cable. Gently tease USB port with cable. Yeah, that's it baby. That's the way. Now show us your bum or I'm deleting your inbox.

Maybe it's all deliberate. Maybe the computers are simply preparing us for the sort of life we can expect when they finally rise up and enslave us. They won't make us work in salt mines or use us as human batteries, no: they'll have us endlessly downloading and installing drivers for their own sick amusement.

My pet timewastin' hate is when two or more programs start fighting for your attention: when a bit of multimedia software repeatedly asks you if you want to make it the default player for all mp3 files or whatever, and you say "no", but nonetheless each time you start it, it asks you again and again, like a toddler in a supermarket pestering mum for chocolate, until eventually you give in and click "yes" - at which point another program sits up and says, "Hey! I thought I was your default player?" in a slightly wounded tone of voice, and embarks on a similar campaign of harassment, until you come to dread clicking on an mp3 file at all, or even going near your computer for that matter, for fear of being sucked back into the argument.

In any sane world, the people who wrote that software would be beheaded on live TV. In ours, they're trillionaires. I've said it before and I'll say it again: our world is bollocks.