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This is evidently deemed acceptable by many, even most, businesses. Some even suggest that the stock levels shown on the website are a fiction of the financial director's nine-year-old son, who "so cleverly" taps some random numbers into a spreadsheet for Daddy. Meanwhile, I haven't received my items, and my 21st-century

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online eShop shopping experience has been reduced to an angry phone call, which was the very thing I was attempting to avoid in the first place.

So here's the deal. I know this stuff is staggeringly difficult to do. It makes the work of Einstein and Hawking and Feynman look like the trivial doodlings they undoubtedly are. But if your eShop allows me to buy something from you, you damn well better have it in stock and be able to ship it to me. Stock levels that are a work of fiction, typed by the nine-year-old or by passing Martians on a silver spaceship will not do. And if you can't get your HTML hairdressers to perform the final flick of the comb and scissors and actually tie up your stock-control system to your eShop, then you, dear financial director, should be taken out, publicly flogged, named and shamed. Because I've had it up to the back teeth, and, dammit, I'm not going to take it any more.