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If you're under 30, then the Prince's Trust can help with low-interest loans - off the top of my head, it's 3% APR and usually spread over 3 years. They also do all sorts of freebie courses and they have a mentoring programme too - where they link you up one to one with a more experienced (poss semi-retired) businessperson to steer you round the curves.

Yeah, I've got the separate phone number, separate email address, PO Box address, different username, and the photo will be swapped out for a logo (ish) as soon as the artist completes it.

But it's like bungee jumping. You know perfectly well that there's all the safety precautions and equipment, all of which you've looked at and checked and can see... but you still need to get past the bit in your brain which is insisting that jumping off a bridge is a BAD thing to do!

My laptop died last summer.

Time to check that the most critical files were safe and sound on USB stick: about thirty seconds.

Time to check that the more general backup (which included additionals of the files on the stick) on the server was okay: maybe ten minutes.

Time to buy a new laptop: including research and shopping around, about 24 hours, plus another 24 hours for delivery.

Time to get laptop out of the box, up and running, open up a couple of files to check they'd transferred across okay: couple of hours.

Time spent swearing at Vista: still going.............

The problem I am having with all of this is that I've spent ten years guarding my identity online, not quite to a tinfoil hat level of paranoia, but it's a matter of pride that if you type my real name into google - even with additional qualifiers - none of my personal stuff comes up. Nothing I've created, nothing about me, no photos, just a load of stuff relating to dead Americans from family-tree sites.

Of course if you know my personal online identity then ten years worth of blogs, photographs and messageboard posts come spilling out, but it would take some effort to link the online persona to the actual flesh-and-blood person.

I can't seem to figure out how to reconcile my ingrained "never use full name, check all privacy settings before posting, never post email in full, no phone number or address details on any visible space" habits with the concept of... well, of marketing myself.

It's average vs typical.

I'm betting, for instance, that people who require frequent treatments or therapies (eg dialysis 3 times a week, or chemotherapy) have each individual visit listed as a separate contact, and that if they get NHS transport (eg cancer patient transferred by non-emergency ambulance from hospice to therapy unit) that's an extra contact for each trip as well.

There'll be the supervised methadone programs in there as well (drugs consumed on-site only) which are daily or even twice-daily contacts.

I'm also betting that things like going into A&E counts as at least 100 separate contacts - a contact with the ambulance service, a contact with the admissions unit, a contact with the triage nurses, a contact with the ward nurses, a contact with a doctor, a contact with the X-ray unit, another contact with a doctor, a contact with the surgery team, a contact with the anaesthesiologists, a contact with the recovery room...

Sorry. I think I've spent too long providing informal tech support at the family-member level.

This might be a silly question, but have you actually listed your business on Google?

I did cold-calling in high school. I wasn't selling - my bonuses were based on getting the people I called to agree to have an *actual* salesman (who, y'know, had half a clue about the product) come to their homes.

What can I say. I was young. I needed the money. Don't judge me!

For the kids, it's not a bad job if you can get past the moral/ethical aspect and don't mind the verbal abuse... at least you're indoors and you don't go home smelling of cheap cooking fat which is more than can be said for most teenage jobs.

For the companies... what's the point in training your phone staff when most of them can't take repeated three-hour shifts of being continually told to eff off and quit within a week or two?

If anyone's on the lookout for insurance, Simply Business do decent quote price comparisons and at the moment if you buy via them you get a voucher for