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Not far from us is one of the country's leading agricultural colleges. The son of a well-to-do farmer was sent there to learn to do what farmers do but, instead of studying, he spent the first term drinking and womanising, as young male students are often wont to do. He returned home at the end of the first term clutching a report documenting his abysmal academic achievement. However, although he was lazy, he was far from thick. He explained to his angry father, "Dad, it's like this. The problem's either genetic or environmental."

I'm using the same environmental excuse to account for my propensity for not dispersing cash. With customers such as mine, who could make Scrooge or Arkwright look like spendthrifts, some of it is bound to rub off.

Can we fix it?

The other day, I was reviewing the support contract renewal schedule with Mrs R when I came upon a defunct entry for Bob the Builder - not the cartoon one, but a guy we did a system for in 1991. He does specialist work for chain stores and needed some non-standard job-costing software to cope with the quirks of his business (not least, the quirky accountant). The system ran under UNIX. In those days, if you wanted something reliable and multi-user, UNIX was the only choice. We had one system that went 21 months without a reboot. And before you ask, it was switched on. You were lucky if Windows 3.1 went a few hours before you saw the dreaded blue screen of death, and were left praying

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that your data had survived the crash. Then there was Windows NT 3.5 (was there ever a 3.0 ?), but we'd best not go down that route - the memories are too painful.

Anyway, we stopped charging Bob for maintenance around 2001 on the basis that if the system broke there was as much chance of getting hold of the right spares as Effing Jeff joining the priesthood. And if we can't guarantee we'll be able to fix things, it's not fair to charge and pretend that you can, then hope and pray that it doesn't go wrong. "Is Bob still using that?" asked Mrs R. "Dunno," I said.

If it ain't broke

I rang him to find out - and indeed, this dinosaur of a system was still running like something horrible that had escaped from the past through a Primeval Anomaly. "Have you thought about replacing it?" "No need," he replied, in a tone implying I was some kind of profligate maniac. "There's nowt wrong wi' it." I ran through the list of possible terminal (pardon the pun) failures: motherboard, memory, hard disk, multi-port serial card, power supply and backup device.

"Oh, that," said Bob, when I mentioned the backup device. "That's gone west, but the computer still works." He apparently tracked down another backup drive the same as the broken one on eBay (it only cost a tenner), but Sid the Storeman who "knows about computers" hadn't fitted it yet. It seems Sid knows so much about computers that he thinks it's a good bet to leave a 17-year-old system without a backup for two months.

I suggested that the whole thing was running on borrowed time. Imagine if the hard disk heads and platters collided - a common cause of mortality in drives of that vintage. This must be a statistical freak to be still running at all. The consequences could be dire:

No-one would know how much the company was owed, or owed to other people, leading to cashflow problems and disrupted supplies

No-one would know what the current contract costs were

The Inland Revenue and Customs would have a field day estimating tax and VAT liabilities.