The past fortnight I have been an utter pest to anyone with ears.

The reason is quite simple, yet crushingly frustrating.

Earlier this year I discovered the external floppy disk drive: a cure to all my woes of lost work and a portal back to a veritable treasure trove of lecture notes.

Positively shivering with the excitement of finally finishing my current paper, I pootled off to the sprawling hub of technical gadgetry: PC World.

Alas, despite snuffling like a piglet on an Monferrato truffle farm, I found nothing.

Thinking they must have sold out of such a necessary item, I quickly stalked the man drifting through the aisles in a lilac shirt, clutching a clipboard and with a curious balloon tied around his wrist.

Such a person must be an aficionado of all things computer, no?

Wrong.

For what seemed like an eternity I described the external floppy disk drive to his utter consternation, and just as it seemed a flip chart was necessary, he surrendered and admitted he had absolutely no idea, inkling, of what I was talking about.

Did I mean one to screw into the CPU? Surely what I was describing did not exist?

Confronted with the prospect of being ejected for talking cyber-gobbledegook, I marched out declaiming the ineptitude of PC World.

What really fuels my fortnight-long tirade is that these stores sell multitudinous boxes of brightly coloured floppy disks, all of which are flanked by rows of gleaming laptops with no floppy disk drives.

Would BMW stock cars accompanied by staff who did not know what wheels were? Would you have to accept your friend’s offer to send the wheels from another country when they go home (in this case Fnac, in France)?

It is bonkers beyond belief.

However, to ease my pain in the meantime, I have found great joy in my new luminous gadget: the laptop hoover, by Digital Daffodil.

Since my pentagenarian laptop has not been cleaned in as many years, and as the ominous over-heating alarm strikes up one year after a maintenance holiday, I’m quite determined not to relinquish my laptop without a fight.

Essentially, the laptop hoover is a tiny device that is powered through the USB hub of the computer, and with two interchangeable heads – one for speakers, one for the keyboard – two power settings, and light to illuminate the pieces of year-old zatar under the keys, it does quite a good job.

After a lengthy session last night, the speakers that once seemed dusted with flour are new gleaming black once more, the keyboard proudly tinkles without the crackling of unknown foodstuffs, and while the fan still rankles like a Boeing 747, I’m confident the compressed air due today will take care of it.

Ultimately, a happy computer has made a very happy owner, though I am still toying with the idea of taking said hoover and external floppy disk drive to the stores and frightening the hell out of the Luddites with my technical prowess.

I wish there could be gadget shops downtown, and not just on the Internet; I would be lost for years in awe and exclamations.