If you've been keeping abreast of technological advances this week, you've be forgiven for thinking we are now inhabiting the space and time previously referred to as The Future.

Streets are soon to be filled with driverless cars; televisions are now capable of engaging us in lively banter and, more sinisterly, recording and reporting us to the authorities for any suspect conversation.

Vaccum cleaners that do the hard graft themselves are now ten a penny and you can lend someone a tenner by simply nodding a phone in their direction.

The more I read about this brave new world, the more I feel I'm living in a parallel universe.

Why, for example, does our super flat screen television with all the trappings fail to do a simple thing such as turn on at first attempt?

Yes, the old-fashioned mechanism which allows the pressure from my finger to make it spring into life is faulty. This morning I spent ten minutes, I tell no lie, TEN minutes repeatedly trying to turn the television on while placating a truculent toddler who knew that he was missing his morning fix of Thomas the Tank Engine.

I developed the dexterity of a bomb-disposal expert as I experimented with different ways of depressing the button in order to coax the thing to spark up.

Why, when I attempt to make a call on my mobile from my house must I stand in the special two square foot of space in the front lounge with my head pressed against the window to the bemusement of my self-consciousness neighbours whose home I absent-mindedly gaze into every time?

Why, does my laptop never start up in the same way twice and why does any attempt to start using it before it is completely ready result in it going in a cream puff and showing me the blue screen of doom?

Technology, for all it's supposed blank-faced subserviance, is surely more temperamental than the most trying of human divas.

And did you see that poor woman who was ravaged by her robot vacuum cleaner this week? She had apparently fallen asleep face-down on the rug in her living room (and why not, she was probably exhausted from supervising a household of appliances with attitude problems). She was rudely awoken when the over-dilligent machine attempted to hoover her up and got tangled in her tresses. It took two men and a pair of shears to set her free.

No, you can keep your mod cons thanks all the same, con being the key word.