Those whom the Gods wish to destroy …

It's snowing still," said Eeyore gloomily.
"So it is."
"And freezing."
"Is it?" "
"Yes," said Eeyore. "However," he said, brightening up a little, "we haven't had an earthquake lately.”

If you wish to preserve any joy in life or any semblance of sanity, never even so much as contemplate helping Athenians with their Macs. I am still recovering from a session last night with my good friend, Yiannis, a man of such implacable moroseness of soul as to drive any would-be Zorba from dancing on the beach to the top of the nearest cliff. The session should have taken no more than 10 minutes as it merely involved adding a printer to my friend’s network; in the event, it seemed to drag on longer than any Greek tragedy.

The evening began with an utterly redundant pre-installation discussion, full of chain smoking, dark prognostications and obscure Hellenic obscenities. Macintosh engineers, it seems, are much given to self-abuse, which is doubtless the result of their dubious parentage. I suspect that the real cause of this bitterness is that one had the temerity to bill my friend for £400 for a visit (remarkably cheap, in my opinion if he had to experience an nth degree of what I went through).

I should have insisted that I be left alone with the machines; instead, not being at all familiar with the Macintosh operating system, I foolishly thought Yiannis might be of some use in finding things like the printers folder. However, as an especially god-cursed Greek, he appears incapable of accepting - far less following - simple instructions. For instance, when asked to print a document, he spent a good quarter of an hour expounding on a) why it probably wouldn’t work and the pointlessness of even trying and on b) his ‘little idea’ about what to do with a spare ethernet wire. Needless to say, after I finally lost patience and gave him a few little suggestions of my own as to what to do with the bloody wire, the document printed perfectly. This made him even gloomier and there was another protracted discussion session before I was allowed to try printing from the other machine. Of course, this worked too.

Instead of expressing any gratitude or the slightest hint of pleasure at my success or – as he would doubtless put it – my failure to fail, Yiannis's despair reached new depths, becoming almost palpable. I left him sitting in a dark despondent miasma examining the printouts for imperfections with the morbid intensity of a forensic scientist; the scene strangely evocative of that in the Oresteia where, to the accompaniment of Agamemnon’s dying screams, Cassandra contemplates her own imminent and exceedingly gruesome murder at the hands of the psychotically vengeful Clytemnestra.

Should any theatre director ever decide to put on an adaptation of Winnie the Pooh in the mode of Aeschylus or of Sophocles’ Oedipus Cycle, I know exactly who should be cast as Eeyore.