Are we really moving forwards

I marvel in awe at all that I see... and I need not look far! A look into my executive case one will find a number of plastic items which may not seem much to Concetta, the village house-wife; a mere collection of modern toys? Perhaps. Toys, indeed! Expensive toys they are, and quite indispensable, too. New toys usher in new names into our vocabulary: the Laptop, the Mobile phone, a mini-scanner, the Ink-Jet or Bubble-Jet printer, the Modem... in plain parlance, the Portable Office!

Let's look inside our executive case. One's gaze will immediately fall on a somewhat flat box. Opening it one finds a keyboard reminiscent of a type-writer and what looks like a non-reflective mirror on the inner surface of the lid. Is this a jewel box? Where does one keep the jewels? No! Dummy. It's a lap-top computer, dear. One significant difference between it and a jewel box is that this box is more expensive than anything you can ever put in it. Though not for long. Before your bank account has been debited the cost of your new purchase, you have already lost half its value over the counter! But it's so powerful, you might add; and right you are until you find out that Messrs. Computer Hardware Development Corporation began to market a newer model ten times the speed, a hundred times the memory, with a dozen accessories (sound card, modem, DVD, colour printer, scanner, digital-camera, surround speakers, etc) and twenty software packages installed for free all for the same price you paid for yours... and that was just a couple of months ago. Trust the luck! But it's happening all the time, even as you read this. And yet, how many of us can do without such a toy?

We have become slaves; and what's worse, slaves to a machine. Just wait till the internal battery leaks, like mine did a few months ago, and there goes your mother-board. Your life suddenly stops still. The parts you need are not available; you take your gadget to the technician and you wait, and wait, and wait. Months elapse and nothing has been done. You attempt to take the bull by its horns and frantically search for the website of the company that manufactured the darn thing and after several hours of riding the electronic version of the merry-go-round you spot an e-mail address of the customer support department. At last, help should soon be on its way! You write to Messrs. Computer Hardware Development Corp. only to find that Mr. Fu G. Yama couldn't give a fig about your problem. His polite letter in Alien-English is the only one you will ever get. It disclaims any responsibility and offers but one solution: if you have the money to be able to get the parts, if these are available, that is, you are advised to purchase that super-dooper model you could have bought but had just missed the last time! This time it is much faster and has more memory but only two accessories. Tough! Unless you're in the same trade, forget it! Instead of having a laptop to help you earn a buck or two, what's left of your income, after the tax department has bitten off a vital chunk of your hard-earned dough to be spent on the seventy-seventh re-surfacing of Psaila Street or a Millennium Dome for Mosta, goes into Messrs. Computer Hardware's pockets! And how are you going to pay the school bill for your kids' education, the water and electricity and phone-bills and the VAT on whatever else you need to buy?

Under this section, I hope to be able to provide a list of names and contact details of technicians, retailers and companies who have provided reliable products, outstanding customer care services and charged a fair price. If I am satisfied then I would like you to know so that you too may benefit from them! May the providers of the best products / services prosper, for the common good of one and all!