First stop, obviously, was getting a modem. I decided I'd better get a fast 28,800 baud one, so that downloading stuff would be practically instantaneous and save on my phone bill. (Aha ha ha. But that's another story.) The nice simple-looking one I saw was about 300 quid, but luckily, I work in the computing industry and a very very lovely friend of mine gave me one for free, which only took a couple of days to install. Phew. Going well so far.

Next up, a 'service provider'. This seems to mean, as far as I can tell, 'someone who lets you use their phone to connect to the Internet'. This seemed odd. Why couldn't I just use mine? But, apparently, you're not allowed to, for some reason. So I phoned them up (this you are allowed to do with your own phone, so don't worry) and gave them some 'virtual money', using my Information SuperCreditCard. In return, they allowed me to use my own telephone again (strangely) to 'download' some software from their 'ftp server'. Thanks to my new superfast modem, this only meant a call of about 55 minutes or so, after which I had some exciting Internet programs.

Sort of. I actually had a 'zip file' (which means 'special program even your PC doesn't understand'), which meant I had to go down to the PC GAMER office, be laughed at by Scary Ted the Technical Editor and all his friends for not having a program called 'PK Unzip', and get him to give me a copy and tell me how to use it. (NB If you don't have a Scary Ted of your own, um, you probably might as well just forget about the whole thing right now.)

After this, I 'unzipped' my file, which then magically turned into lots of little files, which I then had to find with Windows Explorer as I hadn't quite got the hang of 'PK Unzip' yet and they were scattered all over my hard drive. One of them was a huge instructions file, which I printed out and read until it made me cry. After a few hours I'd finally installed everything, which obviously made my PC crash.

For the next couple of weeks everything went as normal, which is to say I had to phone my service provider's helpline at least once every day, I couldn't get any e-mail and my PC crashed all the time. It kept looking for a file called 'vnetsup.vxd', and suggesting that I might like to reinstall the program which was trying to use it, except it wouldn't tell me which program it was. One of its little jokes, I expect. Eventually I carried my entire PC back down to the Escom shop, where the nice man there fiddled with it in complete bafflement and suggested I should perhaps reinstall Windows 95 again and see if that did the trick. (NB If you don't have your own nice man from the Escom shop and you haven't given up yet, do so now). I reinstalled Windows 95 and, sure enough, it worked, which is to say my PC started crashing in a different way. "It's lucky you're using Windows 95 to get on the Internet and not Windows 3.11," said the nice man from Escom, "Or this would be much much more complicated." Now we appeared to be getting somewhere.

This seemed like an opportune moment to phone the helpline, for the 8^th time that week. At the 40^th or 50^th attempt, I got through, and after no more than five or six minutes listening to the horrible pseudo-classical music on their 'holding' system, I spoke to a friendly chap who told me that I'd need to download a whole new version of my Internet software, unzip it with 'PK Unzip', find all the bits and install them again, then write a special program inside my 'C:\WINSOCK\KA9Q\SPOOL\MAIL' directory, of which the following was a typical line:

@*:*.*@* @$1:$2_$3@$4 r

(Honest.) This was a big improvement, which is to say that I could now get e-mail, except instead of appearing in my horrible mail program, it all appeared in the form of a single big text file, with about 20 lines of incomprehensible gibberish at the start and end of each individual message, hidden in the dankest depths of my hard drive. As I write this, that's still what happens. But I'm sure it'll be alright soon. And at least I'm not trying to do it the complicated way.

WILLY THE WOLF'S WORLD

You idiot! You should have bought a Mac, like me! Awoooooo!