Most efficacious in every way

Oh deep joy.

This council's network is never exactly speedy. In fact, we've never really managed to regain the heady line speeds we got used to when we installed our first internet PCs back in '97. Back then you could watch a web page load in a minute or even less. Younger members of staff scorn such ideas as being tainted with the rose-tinted glasses of the purest nostalgic blarney.

Top of today's treats is not having access to our web site. Or our web catalogue. Or our suppliers' catalogues. Or our personal folders. Or USB devices. A combination of network mapping "anomalies," a massive anti-virus upgrade and a corporate internet filter that deems all corporately-derived traffic as being spam appears to be to blame. Or at least, it does if you piece together all the explanations provided by the IT Section over the past three days. Delaney's donkey's probably in there, too, somewhere.

The public PCs are generally better as they're on a different network. Having said that we're still having more fun than we really want. British Standards Online is being a pig to make available, primarily because there's no British Standard for providing a customer-responsive information service; Amish Online isn't available because the buttons don't work; the internet security update is stopping emails' opening; and nothing's going to the network printers.

Happy days...