And I think that the perversity of inanimate objects is somehow all tied up with the way that computers only fail when they know it will do the most damage. Like the night I finished NEVERWHERE, and, delighted, ran a translation program on the chapters, in order to spellcheck them in a different word processing program. And in moments I had a book that consisted of 20 files, each with zero bytes in. I was a long way from home, but several phone calls later a nice man turned up with Norton Utilities, and I spent that night finding the last couple of chapters (everything else had been very backed up, or at least, e-mailed to friends).
Bloody technology. Good night.