Things Will Only Go Wrong If You Fix Them

Okay this is partly work related and will bore anybody who doesn't work in an office or doesn't use a computer at home.

As part of embracing the white hot technology of the 21st Century it is possible to file certain company accounts online at Companies House. I've been doing this since February 2005 and until yesterday I hadn't encountered any problems, no rejections of any sort. Last night the Companies House website was closed for three hours so that 'a maintenance programme designed to improve the operation of the site," was carried out. Today I had three sets of accounts rejected. I filed them again and within half an hour received the 'usual' e-mail informing me that the accounts had been accepted and now appear on public record, an hour later I received three more e-mails telling me that the accounts had been rejected because accounts had already been filed - yes, those that had been rejected the first time.

Meanwhile at home the latest Windows XP patch was available for download and having put off the job of downloading it for a week or two I went ahead and pressed the little yellow button on my toolbar and sat back to wait. First off it conflicted with a programme it said I could work on and took half an hour to undo what it had done wrong, then when it did load it upset the settings on my Norton anti-virus software rendering the scheduling facility inoperable. I e-mail'd Norton who replied within an hour explaining how to correct the problem, I was most impressed by that level of service.

It's frustrating when everything is going along so well and then some IT whizzkid decides that the programme needs tweaking, nine times out of ten that's when the problems begin.