Turning invisible.

I decide I need a laptop. Trying to be self employed while sharing a PC with a Club Penguin addicted nine-year-old is not working out. So I head to PC World.

Their TV ads make it look as if buying anything from them is like being at a party, so I’m expecting this to be a doddle and fun. It’s lashing when I arrive so I’m in my mac, purple oilcloth with cream spots which I like to think is rather stylish. Even if it’s not, I’m not easily missed.

PC World is one of those places I hate, a vast hangar with row after row of computers, netbooks, laptops and heaven only knows what else that is enough to start a technologically challenged person like me hyperventilating in panic.

I’m not just in the communications business, I'm also a Gemini - we are born to talk - hopefully chatting with me isn't too ghastly a prospect so I potter around smiling winningly at the (male) assistants as they whizz pass me, again and again. Perhaps it's the purple mac but none of them seem to want to stop to help me. And I wait……and I wait. A guy comes in and before you know it a sales assistant in a lilac shirt pounces on him and off they go happily to mutally admire the Apple range.

I may be chatty but I'm also what some might call feisty and by now I'm so mad I want to jump up on to one of the display stands and yell 'hello, I may be a woman but I actually want to spend hundreds of pounds, don't you want my money?'

I have to virtually accost an assistant. I explain what I’m after – lots of memory (me and the laptop), good connection speed blah, blah, blah. I think I’ve been businesslike and succinct. He leads me along the rows to a blue Packard Bell. I almost sense what is coming when he closes the lid, strokes it and says ‘this one has a lovely texture, it’s not plasticky like some of the others and it comes in a range of colours.’

I don’t think I’ve been that spectacularly patronised for years. My Surrey accent becomes even posher and more clipped in my anger as I spit out that I don’t care what it feels like or what colour it is, I’d like to know what it does. And me and my purple spotty mac stomp out of PC World.

Back home I order a Dell online.  It’s red and shiny……