It all started so normally yesterday. Got up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head. Found my way downstairs and drank a cup and looking up I noticed I was I late. Found my coat and grabbed my hat, made the bus in seconds flat. Found my way upstairs and had a smoke, somebody spoke and I went into a dream...

I sat down in my office and turned on the computer and then it happened. Nothing. No e-mail, no worldwide web, nothing. Just a great big blank screen with the words "The Internet has been deleted" sitting in the middle of the screen. Someone looked up from the next office and shouted, "Has your internet been deleted?" which was returned with a chorus of agreement from the offices in the vicinity.

I phoned the help desk to find out what was going on. Apparently someone in the United States was cleaning up some of the old internet protocols and they pressed the delete key by mistake. Of course there is so much stuff on the web that you got the old Windows Message "file too large for deleted items. Delete anyway?" and one mistaken click later, the internet was gone. Puff. I bet that poor guy panicked. If he'd been using a mac he at least could have pressed the escape key and probably most of the web would have survived. The odd porn site and the occasional irrelevant blog might have gone but at least the majority of the web would have survived.

So there we were. No Internet. Someone shouted that Patience was still working which was something but how was I going to update myself with the interesting e-mails that were sent overnight or find out the latest news from the BBC? There was only one thing to do. Have a coffee. Crap coffee maybe but at least it was caffeine and that would give some time to decide what to do next. Unsurprisingly the coffee room was full to bursting. The conversations seemed to split three ways. The younger people seemed to only be worrying about their inability to read or update their facebook pages. The older ones were reminding everyone in raised voices that this was bound to happen in the end and life was much better (winters colder, summers hotter) in the olden days when they used Semaphore and letters to communicate. The third group, visually identifiable by their Birkenstock sandals seemed to just be discussing that if only people had listened to them in the first place and used Linux instead of Windows we wouldn't be all standing here. I have to believe this is what they were saying as it actually came across as a whole series of grunts, beeps and other noises created during engineerspeak.

In the corridor someone shouted "I've got a signal on my Blackberry". I don't know who it was and the body was indistinguishable after the stampede but when the fastest and fittest had grabbed the handheld device it all turned out to be a little joke. A bit like this text.

My wife said on Friday night, "What if the Internet was deleted?", to which I responded "it can't". But what if it were. Would we miss our e-mails most or our facebook communications? I would miss Google, without which I would have had to turn to a book to give me the lyrics to the wonderful Beatles track, A day in the life, the eight lines of which started this irrelevant piece of drivel. Saying that, I still had more fun writing this tosh than a thousand e-mails would ever bring....more to come.